A Benchmark of Non-intrusive Parametric Audio Quality Estimation Models for Broadcasting Systems and Web-casting Applications

Abstract

Due to the rising usage of various broadcasting systems and web-casting applications, a measurement of audio quality has become an essential task. This paper presents a benchmark of the parametric models for non-intrusive estimation of the audio quality perceived by the end user. The proposed solution is based on machine learning techniques for broadcasting systems and web-casting applications. The main goal of this study is to assess the performance of the non-intrusive parametric models as well as to evaluate a statistical significance of the performance differences between those models. The paper provides a comparison of several models based on the Support Vector Regression, Genetic Programming, Multigene Symbolic Regression, Neural Networks and Random Forest. The obtained results indicate that among the investigated models the most accurate, although not the fastest ones, are the model based on Random Forest (a broadcast scenario) and the SVR-based model (a web-cast scenario). These models represent promising candidates for non-intrusive parametric audio quality assessment in the context of broadcasting systems and web-casting applications.

Keywords

• artificial neural networks
• audio quality estimation
• broadcast
• machine learning
• statistical significance
• support vector regression
• web-cast.