Assessment of Listening Effort for various Telecommunication Scenarios

Abstract:
Speech communication under adverse conditions may be extremely stressful for the person located at the receiving (or near-end) side. There, background noise may originate from the given environment and cannot be reduced for the listener. Additionally, processed speech from the far-end might be degraded by the transmission network, due to e.g., transcoding or packet loss. The assessment of several issues mentioned above is partly already addressed by existing state-of-the-art methods. They are often related to speech quality, though. Examples include ETSI 103 281 for noise reduction on the sending side or Recommendation ITU-T P.863 for networkrelated processing. However, for many scenarios, where quality is already considerably degraded, an intelligibilityrelated measure is of higher interest. As an alternative to auditory or instrumental assessment of intelligibility, perceived Listening Effort (LE) was found to be a more suitable measure for such scenarios in several recent studies. This contribution presents the latest developments of an instrumental prediction model that is based on a comprehensive amount of subjective databases.