Techniques for measurement of perceptual audio quality

A computer-readable medium having encoded therein computer-executable instructions for causing a computer programmed thereby to perform a method of measuring audio quality of a block of spectral data, the method comprising:

• in an iteration of a quantization loop,
• reconstructing a block of frequency coefficients quantized as plural quantization bands;
• processing the reconstructed block as plural critical bands according to an auditory model, wherein the plural critical bands are variable relative to the plural quantization bands;
• and
• measuring quality of the reconstructed block.

A computer-readable medium having encoded therein computer-executable instructions for causing a computer programmed thereby to perform a method of measuring quality of plural blocks of audio data, wherein each of the plural blocks has one of plural available block sizes, the method comprising:

• for each of the plural blocks of audio data,
• normalizing the block;
• and
• computing a quality measure for the normalized block.

In a computer system, a method for measuring audio quality comprising:

• step for computing an effective excitation pattern for a block of audio data based at least in part upon a reconstructed audio excitation pattern for the block;
• step for computing a noise pattern for the block;
• and
• step for computing a quality measure for the block based at least in part upon ratio of the noise pattern to the effective excitation pattern.

A computer-readable medium having encoded therein computer-executable instructions for causing a computer programmed thereby to perform a method of measuring audio quality, the method comprising:

• computing an original audio masking measure;
• computing a reconstructed audio masking measure;
• and
• computing an effective masking measure based at least in part upon the reconstructed audio masking measure and the original audio masking measure.

In an audio encoder, a computer-implemented method comprising:

• measuring quality of plural blocks of spectral audio data in an encoding session, comprising:
• for a first block of the plural blocks, weighting a first quality measure with a first set of band weights;
• and
• for a second block of the plural blocks, weighting a second quality measure with a second set of band weights different than the first set of band weights.

A computer-readable medium having encoded therein computer-executable instructions for causing a computer programmed thereby to perform a method of measuring audio quality, the method comprising:

• for each of one or more blocks of frequency coefficients,
• determining one or more arrays of band weights for the block, wherein the one or more arrays of bands weights are variable from block to block;
• and
• computing a band-weighted quality measure, wherein the one or more arrays of band weights modify the quality measure.