Plenary Talks

“Measuring the Quality of Speech and Music Signals”

Dr. John G. Beerends, TNO, Netherlands

Abstract

In this presentation I will give a fundamental approach towards measuring the quality of audio devices. Over the last decades several measurement methods were developed and standardized for measuring speech and audio quality. The best known ones are ITU-T recommendation P.862 PESQ (Perceptual Evaludation of Speech Quality) for speech and ITU-R recommendation BS.1387 PEAQ (Perceptual Evaludation of Audio Quality) for music. Both systems are however focused on their own application area and an integrated approach towards measuring speech and music quality has never been successfull up to now. In this presentation I will give a new perceptual measurement approach that allows assessment of speech and music quality with the same basic measurement appraoch. This approach was recently evaluated in an ITU-T benchmark for establishing the follow up recommnedation of P.862 PESQ.

Biography

John G. Beerends received a degree in electrical engineering from the HTS (Polytechnic Institute) of The Hague 1975.  After working as an electronic engineer for three years he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Leiden where he received an M.Sc. in 1984. He then worked on pitch perception at the Institute for Perception Research where he received a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Eindhoven in 1989. In 1989 he joined KPN research where he developed PSQM, a speech quality measure that was standardized within ITU-T in 1996 as Recommendation P.861. The follow up, PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality), was jointly developed with British Telecom labs and standardized as Rec. P.862 in 2001. In January 2003 TNO took over the research activities from KPN where John continued his work on audio and video quality assessment. He contributed to the video quality measurement standard J.247 (standardized in 2008). His latest work is focussed on follow up of PESQ.

“Vision Model and Visual Quality”

Dr. Andrew B. Watson, NASA Ames Research Center, USA

Abstract

One grand challenge for the engineering of multimedia quality has been to develop algorithms that can convert physical measurements – of displays, of images, or of video sequences – into metrics that have perceptual meaning. These metrics should enable automated detection of artifacts, and optimization of positive multimedia attributes. In the last decade, we and others have made some progress towards this goal. The progress has been achieved by joining display and image measurements to simplified models of processing in the human visual system. In this talk I will describe several of the key concepts and components of these models, and will show how the models can be applied to key problems in display design and image and video processing.

Biography

Andrew B. Watson did undergraduate work at Columbia University and received a PhD in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the University of Cambridge in England and at Stanford University in California. Since 1980 he has worked at NASA Ames Research Center in California, where he is the Senior Scientist for Vision Research, and where he works on models of vision and their application to visual technology. He is the author of over 100 papers on topics such as spatial and temporal sensitivity, motion perception, image quality, and neural models of visual coding and processing. He is the author of six patents, in areas such as image compression, video quality, and detection of artifacts in display manufacturing. In 2001, he founded the Journal of Vision (http://journalofvision.org) where he now serves as Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Watson is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, and of the Society for Information Display. He also serves as the Vice Chair for Vision Science and Human Factors of the International Committee on Display Measurement. In 1990, he received NASA’s H. Julian Allen Award for outstanding scientific paper, and in 1993 he was appointed Ames Associate Fellow for exceptional scientific achievement. He is the 2007 recipient of the Otto Schade Award from the Society for Information Display, and the 2008 winner of the Special Recognition Award from the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.