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On the use of the i-vector speech representation for instrumental quality measurement

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Abstract

The i-vector framework has been widely used to summarize speaker-dependent information present in a speech signal. Considered the state-of-the-art in speaker verification for many years, its potential to estimate speech recording distortion/quality has been overlooked. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap. We conduct a detailed analysis of how distortions are captured in the total variability space. We then propose a full-reference speech quality model based on i-vector similarities and three no-reference approaches. The first no-reference approach makes use of a single reference i-vector based on the average of i-vectors extracted from clean signals. A second approach relies on a vector quantizer codebook of representative clean speech i-vectors. Lastly, i-vectors and subjective ratings were used to train a no-reference deep neural network model for speech quality assessment. Four experiments have shown that the proposed methods, based on the i-vector speech representation, are well-suited for assessing speech quality. Results show correlations with subjective quality judgments similar to those achieved with standardized instrumental algorithms, particularly for degradations caused by noise and reverberation.ϖ

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologies (FRQNT), and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for their financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut national de la recherche scientifique, 800, rue de la Gauchetière Ouest, Montréal, QC, H5A 1K6, Canada

    Anderson R. Avila, Douglas O’Shaughnessy & Tiago H. Falk

  2. Computer Research Institut of Montreal, 405, Ogilvy Avenue, suite 101, Montréal, QC, H3N 1M3, Canada

    Anderson R. Avila & Jahangir Alam

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  1. Anderson R. Avila
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  2. Jahangir Alam
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  4. Tiago H. Falk
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Correspondence to Anderson R. Avila.

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Avila, A.R., Alam, J., O’Shaughnessy, D. et al. On the use of the i-vector speech representation for instrumental quality measurement. Qual User Exp 5, 6 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41233-020-00036-z

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