Perceptual Audio Quality Assessment for Coder Evaluation

The sound is part of the human stimuli, whose information is given by pressure fluctuations into the ear. The perceived sound quality has recently evaluated the performance of audio coders. Newer evaluation methodologies involve psychological and physiological responses of human listeners. However, there is no available methodology providing any relationship between the perceptual assessment and the audio coder performance evaluation. The present work illustrates the Perceptual Audio Quality Assessment (PQA), which analyzes the sound quality perceived by a listener, using a database composed of distorted audio recordings. The distorted records also pass through channels commonly used for audio signal transmission. This experiment allows us to determine a methodology that gives the first step to select an adequate audio compression format and the appropriate modulation/coding scheme for transmitting an audio signal format without a perceived loss.