Fullband conversational codec: What testing methodology?

In ITU-T Study Group 12, the ITU-T lead study group on quality of service and performance, most of the activities have mainly focused until now on Narrowband and Wideband speech codec performance evaluation. As ITU-T Study Group 16 (that has a mandate for studies on media coding), is working on codecs with wider audio bandwidth, ITU-T SG12 has extended its scope to study quality assessment methodologies appropriate for wider bandwidths. After a presentation of ITU-T speech and audio codec standardization process and an overview of the audio quality testing methodologies, this paper describes the ITU-T G.722.1 Fullband qualification exercise and the adopted testing methodology as well as the following characterization phase and its related methodology.