A short-time objective intelligibility measure for time-frequency weighted noisy speech

Existing objective speech-intelligibility measures are suitable for several types of degradation, however, it turns out that they are less appropriate for methods where noisy speech is processed by a timefrequency (TF) weighting, e.g., noise reduction and speech separation. In this paper, we present an objective intelligibility measure, which shows high correlation (rho=0.95) with the intelligibility of both noisy, and TF-weighted noisy speech. The proposed method shows significantly better performance than three other, more sophisticated, objective measures. Furthermore, it is based on an intermediate intelligibility measure for short-time (approximately 400 ms) TF-regions, and uses a simple DFT-based TF-decomposition. In addition, a free Matlab implementation is provided.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICASSP
• Authors: Cees H. Taal, Richard C. Hendriks, Richard Heusdens, Jesper Jensen
• Keywords: ICASSP 2010, Intelligibility Measure, Noisy Speech, Objective Intelligibility Measure, Signal Processing