Development of a Sound Quality Evaluation Model Based on an Optimal Analytic Wavelet Transform and an Artificial Neural Network

The purpose of this study was to develop a sound quality model for real time active sound quality control systems. The model is based on an optimal analytic wavelet transform (OAWT) used along with a back propagation neural network (BPNN) in which the initial weights and thresholds are determined by particle swarm optimisation (PSO). In the model the input signal is decomposed into 24 critical bands to extract a feature matrix, based on energy, mean, and standard deviation indices of the sub signal scalogram obtained by OAWT. The feature matrix is fed into the neural network input to determine the psychoacoustic parameters used for sound quality evaluation. The results of the study show that the present model is in good agreement with psychoacoustic models of sound quality metrics and enables evaluation of the quality of sound at a lower computational cost than the existing models.