A novel objective method for evaluating the quality of streaming audio

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to present a new objective method for evaluating the quality of streaming audio — PESAQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Streaming Audio Quality). According to our experiments, we found that the ITU recommended objective evaluation method — PEAQ(Perceptual Evaluation of Audio Quality) can not fit the subjective quality of streaming audio accurately. To develop the new method PESAQ, firstly, the jitters in the streaming audio are removed by the alignment algorithm, so that we get the aligned streaming audio. Secondly, the degradation between reference audio and the aligned streaming audio is measured by PEAQ, and its result is called ODG (Objective Difference Grade). Thirdly, the degradation between the original streaming audio and the aligned streaming audio is also measured by the DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) minimum distance, which then is mapped to a quality score, DTW-ODG. Finally, the objective score of the quality of streaming audio IP-ODG is computed by adding the two scores of ODG and DTW-ODG together. Our results prove that the proposed method — PESAQ is effective for the objective evaluation of the streaming audio quality and performs better than PEAQ.