Objective evaluation of the speech quality of a directional loudspeaker using P.862

Abstract

Directional sound is used for many applications like in-store displays that require to be active only when one walks past to it, hospital televisions that particularly focus sound to specific patient, for police announcements, for the announcements in galleries, museums, and exhibitions, analysis of layered structures etc. Nowadays, highly directional loudspeakers with beam-widths as narrow as 5 degrees are available. The quality of both the male and the female speech signal produced by the directional loudspeaker as a function of source degradation is analyzed using P.862 at different signal power to noise power ratio values. The speech quality produced by the directional loudspeaker is also compared with the speech quality produced by a normal omni-directional loudspeaker based on the mean opinion score. It is observed that the normal omni-directional loudspeaker produces better quality speech compared to the directional loudspeaker.