Objective speech measure for Chinese in wireless environment

Abstract

The cellular phone is becoming an important means of mobile wireless communication, especially in metropolitan areas. One of the important operating considerations of the cellular phone service providers is the maintainence of the speech quality of the cellular phone network. Subjective evaluation by repeated listening tests at various sites within the coverage area is impractical due to its intrinsic laborious and expensive nature. As a result, it would be much desirable to have an automatic objective evaluation system which applies a good objective speech measure to estimate the statistical average of subjective opinions of the typical conversational speech sentences sent through the cellular network. While extensive work was done for objective speech measures for languages such as English, Japanese, French, and other western languages, little has been done for Chinese. In addition, little has been done to quantify speech quality in the wireless environment.