Influence of Silence and Noise Filtering on Speech Quality Monitoring

Abstract

With the exponential increase of mobile users and internet subscribers, the utilization of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) application is increasing dramatically. People exploit different VoIP applications for effective communication, for example, Google Meet, Microsoft Skype, Zoom video conferencing applications, etc. The single-ended speech quality metrics are employed for measuring and monitoring the quality of speech. However, different types of degradations present in the surroundings distort the quality of speech. In order to meet the desired quality of experience (QoE) level of end-user while using VoIP applications, it is necessary to reduce VoIP degradations and obtain the optimized speech quality. Along that line, this paper investigates the conjunction of filtering of silence and noise as a pre-processing block with the single-ended speech quality metric under various common occurring degradations encountered during VoIP communication. This can help the internet service providers in understanding the potential root cause of decrement in quality of speech and then applying the QoE management service to fulfill desired human QoE level. Results demonstrate that the deployment of joint pre-processing on speech samples under various VoIP degradations improves the quality of speech to a great extent.