A non-intrusive Short-Time Objective Intelligibility measure

Abstract

We propose a non-intrusive intelligibility measure for noisy and non-linearly processed speech, i.e. a measure which can predict intelligibility from a degraded speech signal without requiring a clean reference signal. The proposed measure is based on the Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) measure. In particular, the non-intrusive STOI measure estimates clean signal amplitude envelopes from the degraded signal. Subsequently, the STOI measure is evaluated by use of the envelopes of the degraded signal and the estimated clean envelopes. The performance of the proposed measure is evaluated on a dataset including speech in different noise types, processed with binary masks. The measure is shown to predict intelligibility well in all tested conditions, with the exception of those including a single competing speaker. While the measure does not perform as well as the original (intrusive) STOI measure, it is shown to outperform existing non-intrusive measures.