Evaluation of the ITU-R objective audio quality measurement method

Abstract

The ITU-R recommended method for objective quality measurements of wide-bandwidth audio systems was evaluated by predicting the subjective performance of several perceptual audio codecs. The results show that the predicted quality ratings for the codecs correlate well with subjective ratings obtained from a formal listening test. Further, the objective quality measurements averaged over audio items were statistically indistinguishable from similarly averaged subjective quality ratings. Finally, mean objective codec quality measurements generated from a larger number of preselected audio items were found to be similar to the subjective ratings and objective quality measurements for a few critical items chosen for the listening test.