Reference-Free Speech Quality Assessment for Mobile Phones Based on Audio Perception

Speech quality evaluation is a very complex task with important applications. With the deployment of 3G and 4G networks, the end-user is requiring more quality of service. Currently, the assessment of speech quality over mobile phones is done in a controlled environment with a reference clean signal and its distorted version. However, this does not evaluate the quality of speech in a real-time situation as it demands a reference signal. In this paper, it is introduced a new method to classify a speech signal over a mobile device as distorted or not. The degraded signal is evaluated and its quality is scored similarly as what is done by PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality). The experiments proved that the method is quite efficient with an average difference of 12% comparing to PESQ scores which is based on a reference clean signal.