Comparison and Analysis of the Susceptibility of Wideband and Telephone-band Speech to Various Environmental Additive Noise Sources

Abstract:

In this paper a comparison is made between wideband (50-7000Hz) and telephone-band (300-3400Hz) speech under different background noise scenarios. It is generally accepted that clean wideband (WB) speech has a perceptually superior quality than clean telephone-band (TB) speech. In speech-communication systems, however, noise is an unavoidable obstacle. In the presence of background noise the speech quality and/or intelligibilitywould be degraded, and thereby the features which make wideband speech superior to TB speech might be partially lost. Therefore, a comparison and analysis of the susceptibility of the quality of WB and TB speech to various environmental noises is done by means of objective and subjective measures. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the speech to disturbances within specific bands (e.g., 0-1kHz, 1-2kHz,...,7-8kHz) are also compared. Initial results in this direction imply that the presence of noise in WB speech is more annoying than when present in TB speech. These findings may serve as a guide for modifying already existing TB speech-processing algorithms for WB speech-communication applications by applying suitable signal-processing in the additional bands (50-300Hz and 3400-7000Hz).


Year: 2007
In session: Grundlagen
Pages: 27 to 34