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Impact of Packet Loss Location on Perceived Speech Quality
Sun L, Wade G, Lines BL, Ifeachor E
Proceedings of 2nd IP-Telephony Workshop (IPTEL '01), Columbia University, New York, pp114-122, 2-3 April, 2001
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In VoIP applications, packet loss can have a major impact on
perceived speech quality. The impact is affected by factors such as packet
loss size, loss pattern and loss locations. In this paper, we report an
investigation into the impact of loss location on perceived speech quality
and the relationships between convergence time and loss location for three
different codecs (G.729, G.723.1 and AMR) using perceptual-based objective
measurement methods (PSQM+, MNB and EMBSD). Our results show that loss
location has a severe effect on perceived speech quality. The loss at
unvoiced speech segments has little impact on perceived speech quality for
all codecs. However, the loss at the beginning of voiced segments has the
most severe impact on perceived speech quality. The convergence time depends
on the speech content (voiced/unvoiced). For unvoiced segments, the
convergence time is stable whereas for voiced segments it varies but has an
upper bound at the end of the segment. Our method allows a more accurate
measurement of the exact effect of packet loss on perceived speech quality.
This could help in the development of a perceptually relevant packet loss
metric, which could be valuable in non-intrusive VoIP measurements.

Sun L, Wade G, Lines BL, Ifeachor E