Objective speech quality estimation for analog mobile channels: Problems and solutions

This article describes an objective speech quality assessment method developed for the Hungarian NMT-450 cellular mobile telephone system. The method is based on a psychoacoustic front end followed by a cognitive modeling component. Special problems of the NMT system, such as handover (HOV), the effects of automatic gain control (AGC), & the intrusion of signaling noise, are addressed in the cognitive module. Correlation between the subjective & objective quality measures is maximized by finding a transformation that linearizes their relationship. A correlation of 0.95 is achieved on an independent test set between the subjective speech quality & the proposed objective quality measure. 1 Table, 9 Figures, 9 References. Adapted from the source document