Objective assessment of speech and audio quality - Technology and applications

In the past few years, objective quality assessment models have become increasingly used for assessing or monitoring speech and audio quality. By measuring perceived quality on an easily-understood subjective scale, such as listening quality (excellent, good, fair, poor, bad), these methods provide a quick and repeatable way to estimate customer experience. Typical applications include audio quality evaluation, selection of codecs or other equipment, and measuring the quality of telephone networks. To introduce this Special Issue, this paper provides an overview of the field, outlining the main approaches to intrusive, nonintrusive and parametric models and discussing some of their limitations and areas of future work.