Hearing-Aid Speech Quality Index (HASQI) is a measure of audio quality originally designed for the evaluation of speech quality for those with a

hearing aid A hearing aid is a device designed to improve hearing by making sound audible to a person with hearing loss. Hearing aids are classified as medical devices in most countries, and regulated by the respective regulations. Small audio amplifiers su ...

,. It has also been shown to be able to gauge audio quality for non-speech sounds and for listeners without a

hearing loss Hearing loss is a partial or total inability to Hearing, hear. Hearing loss may be present at birth or acquired at any time afterwards. Hearing loss may occur in one or both ears. In children, hearing problems can affect the ability to Language ...

Background

While the perception of audio quality can be gauged through perceptual measurements, the testing is time-consuming to undertake. Consequently, a number of metrics have been developed to allow audio quality to be evaluated without the need for human listening. Standardized examples from

telephony Telephony ( ) is the field of technology involving the development, application, and deployment of telecommunication services for the purpose of electronic transmission of voice, fax, or data, between distant parties. The history of telephony is i ...

include PESQ, POLQA, PEVQ and

PEAQ Perceptual Evaluation of Audio Quality (PEAQ) is a standardized algorithm for objectively measuring perceived audio quality, developed in 1994-1998 by a joint venture of experts within Task Group 6Q of the International Telecommunication Union's Rad ...

. HASQI was originally developed by Kates and Arehart to evaluate how the distortions introduced by

hearing aids A hearing aid is a device designed to improve hearing by making sound audible to a person with hearing loss. Hearing aids are classified as medical devices in most countries, and regulated by the respective regulations. Small audio amplifiers su ...

degrade quality. They also produced a new version in 2014. Kressner et al. tested a speech corpus different from the dataset used to develop HASQI and showed that the index generalizes well for listeners without a hearing loss with a performance comparable to PESQ. Kendrick et al. showed that HASQI can grade the audio quality of music and geophonic, biophonic, and anthrophonic quotidian sounds, although their study used a more limited set of degradations.

Method

HASQI and its 2014 revision are double-ended methods requiring both a clean reference and the degraded signal to allow evaluation. The index attempts to capture the effects of noise, nonlinear distortion, linear filtering and spectral changes, by computing the difference or correlation between key audio features. This is done by examining short-time signal envelopes to quantify the degradation caused by noise and nonlinear filtering, and long-time signal envelopes to quantify the effects of linear filtering. Version 2 of HASQI includes a model to capture some aspects of the peripheral

auditory system The auditory system is the sensory system for the sense of hearing. It includes both the sensory organs (the ears) and the auditory parts of the sensory system. System overview The outer ear funnels sound vibrations to the eardrum, increasin ...

for both normal and hearing impaired listeners. Kendrick et al. developed a blind (single-ended) method, bHASQI, using machine learning. This enables the audio quality to be evaluated from just the degraded signal without needing the clean reference.

References

{{Reflist

External links

* Code for evaluating bHASQ
Source code for blind detection and metering of distortion and clipping
Hearing aids Audio codecs Speech codecs Digital audio

Background

Method

See also

References

External links