Non-Intrusive Binaural Prediction of Speech Intelligibility Based on Phoneme Classification
Jana Rosbach, Saskia Röttges, Christopher F. Hauth, Thomas Brand, Bernd T. Meyer
Abstract
In this study, we explore an approach for modeling speech intelligibility in spatial acoustic scenes. To this end, we combine a non-intrusive binaural frontend with a deep neural network (DNN) borrowed from a standard automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. The DNN estimates phoneme probabilities that degrade in the presence of noise and reverberation, which is quantified with an entropy-based measure. The model output is used to predict speech recognition thresholds, i.e., signal-to-noise ratio with 50% word recognition accuracy. It is compared to measured data obtained from eight normal-hearing listeners in acoustic scenarios with varying positions of localized maskers, different rooms and reverberation times. The model is non-intrusive; yet it produces a root mean squared error in the range of 0.6-2.1 dB, which is similar to results obtained with a reference model (0.3-1.8 dB) that uses oracle knowledge both in the frontend and in the backend stage.