An analysis of the impact of playout delay adjustments introduced by VoIP jitter buffers on listening speech quality

This paper investigates the impact of frequent and small playout delay adjustments (time-shifting) of 30 ms or less introduced to silence periods by Voice over IP (VoIP) jitter buffer strategies on listening quality perceived by the end user. In particular, the quality impact is assessed using both a subjective method (quality scores obtained from subjective listening test) and an objective method based on perceptual modelling. Two different objective methods are used, PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality, ITU-T Recommendation P.862) and POLQA (Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Assessment, ITU-T Recommendation P.863). Moreover, the relative accuracy of both objective models is assessed by comparing their predictions with subjective assessments. The results show that the impact of the investigated playout delay adjustments on subjective listening quality scores is negligible. On the other hand, a significant impact is reported for objective listening quality scores predicted by the PESQ model i.e. the PESQ model fails to correctly predict quality scores for this kind of degradation. Finally, the POLQA model is shown to perform significantly better than PESQ. We conclude the paper by identifying further related research that arises from this study.