Perceived Quality of an Audio Signal Impaired by Signal Loss: Psychoacoustic Tests and Prediction Model

Sporadic signal loss is a temporal degradation that can be found in audio streaming over mobile Internet or triple play services. Radio channel errors, packet loss or reconstruction strategy failures can lead to irregular audio discontinuities having a negative impact on the end-user quality assessment of the sequence. We therefore propose two models that predict the quality assessment from a group of listeners when an audio wideband sequence is impaired by a distribution of signal losses. The model showing the highest performance takes into account non-linear listeners´ assessment characteristics based on psychoacoustic experiments.