TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2009//
TI  - Objective measures for predicting speech intelligibility in noisy conditions based on new band-importance functions
JO  - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
A1  - Ma, Jianfen
A1  - Hu, Yi
A1  - Loizou, Philipos C.
SP  - 3387
EP  - 3405
VL  - 125
IS  - 5
N2  - The articulation index (AI), speech-transmission index (STI), and coherence-based intelligibility metrics have been evaluated primarily in steady-state noisy conditions and have not been tested extensively in fluctuating noise conditions. The aim of the present work is to evaluate the performance of new speech-based STI measures, modified coherence-based measures, and AI-based measures operating on short-term (30 ms) intervals in realistic noisy conditions. Much emphasis is placed on the design of new band-importance weighting functions which can be used in situations wherein speech is corrupted by fluctuating maskers. The proposed measures were evaluated with intelligibility scores obtained by normal-hearing listeners in 72 noisy conditions involving noise-suppressed speech (consonants and sentences) corrupted by four different maskers (car, babble, train, and street interferences). Of all the measures considered, the modified coherence-based measures and speech-based STI measures incorporating signal-specific band-importance functions yielded the highest correlations (r=0.89-0.94). The modified coherence measure, in particular, that only included vowel/consonant transitions and weak consonant information yielded the highest correlation (r=0.94) with sentence recognition scores. The results from this study clearly suggest that the traditional AI and STI indices could benefit from the use of the proposed signal- and segment-dependent band-importance functions.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 0001-4966
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.3097493
ID  - ref1
ER  -