Improvement and Assessment of Spectro-Temporal Modulation Analysis for Speech Intelligibility Estimation
Abstract
Several recent high-performing intelligibility estimators of acoustically degraded speech signals employ temporal modulation analysis. In this paper, we investigate the utility of using both spectro- and temporal-modulation for estimating speech intelligibility. We modified a pre-existing speech intelligibility estimation scheme (STMI) that was inspired by human auditory spectro-temporal modulation analysis. We produced several variants of the modified STMI and assessed their intelligibility prediction accuracy, in comparison with several high-performing estimators. Among the estimators tested, one of the STMI variants and eSTOI performed consistently well on both noisy and reverberated speech. These results suggest that spectro-temporal modulation analysis is useful for certain degradation conditions such as modulated noise and reverberation.