ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

PLCMOS – A Data-driven Non-intrusive Metric for The Evaluation of Packet Loss Concealment Algorithms

Lorenz Diener, Marju Purin, Sten Sootla, Ando Saabas, Robert Aichner, Ross Cutler

Speech quality assessment is a problem for every researcher working on models that produce or process speech. Human subjective ratings, the gold standard in speech quality assessment, are expensive and time-consuming to acquire in a quantity that is sufficient to get reliable data, while automated objective metrics show a low correlation with gold standard ratings. This paper presents PLCMOS, a non-intrusive data-driven tool for generating a robust, accurate estimate of the mean opinion score a human rater would assign an audio file that has been processed by being transmitted over a degraded packet-switched network with missing packets being healed by a packet loss concealment algorithm. Our new model shows a model-wise Pearson’s correlation of ~0.97 and rank correlation of ~0.95 with human ratings, substantially above all other available intrusive and non-intrusive metrics.