Auditory distortion measures for speech coder evaluation

One of the important research problems in the area of speech coding is to determine the sound quality of coded speech signals. This quality can best be evaluated by a subjective assessment which is often difficult to administer and time consuming. An objective measure which is consistent with subjective assessment could play a vital role in the evaluation as well as in the design of a low bit-rate speech coder. In this dissertation, we introduce two distortion measures for speech coder evaluation. Since the perceptual abilities of a human being determine the precision with which speech data must be processed, we consider the details of cochlear (inner ear) and other auditory processing. Using Lyon's auditory model, the time-domain signal is mapped onto a perceptual-domain (PD). Any speech utterance is communicated to the brain through a series of all-or-none electrical spikes (firings) and the PD representation provides information pertaining to the probability-of-firings in the neural channels. Our first measure, namely the cochlear discrimination information (CDI), evaluates the cross-entropy of the neural firings for the coded speech with respect to those for the original one. With this measure, we also compute the rate-distortion function determining the lowest bit-rate required for a specified amount of distortion. In the second measure, namely the cochlear hidden Markovian (CHM) measure, we attempt to capture the high-level processing in the brain with simple hidden Markov models (HMMs). We characterize the firing events by HMMs where the order of occurrence of PD observations and correlations among adjacent observations are modeled suitably. For computing the coder distortion, the PD observations of the coded speech are matched against the HMMs derived from the PD observations of the original speech. Experimental results show that these measures conform to subjective evaluation results in majority of the cases. Finally, the introduced measures are also applied in speech coder analysis, e.g., in the pitch frequency determination and the evaluation of noise weighting schemes.