Non-intrusive method for audio quality assessment of lossy-compressed music recordings using convolutional neural networks

Most of the existing algorithms for the objective audio quality assessment are intrusive, as they require access both to an unimpaired reference recording and an evaluated signal. This feature excludes them from many practical applications. In this paper, we introduce a non-intrusive audio quality assessment method. The proposed method is intended to account for audio artefacts arising from the lossy compression of music signals. During its development, 250 high-quality uncompressed music recordings were collated. They were subsequently processed using the selection of five popular audio codecs, resulting in the repository of 13,000 audio excerpts representing various levels of audio quality. The proposed non-intrusive method was trained with the data obtained employing a well-established intrusive model (ViSQOL v3). Next, the performance of the trained model was evaluated utilizing the quality scores obtained in the subjective listening tests undertaken remotely over the Internet. The listening tests were carried out in compliance with the MUSHRA recommendation (ITU-R BS.1534-3). In this study, the following three convolutional neural networks were compared: (1) a model employing 1D convolutional filters, (2) an Inception-based model, and (3) a VGG-based model. The last-mentioned model outperformed the model employing 1D convolutional filters in terms of predicting the scores from the listening tests, reaching a correlation value of 0.893. The performance of the Inceptionbased model was similar to that of the VGG-based model. Moreover, the VGG-based model outperformed the method employing a stacked gated-recurrent-unit-based deep learning framework, recently introduced by Mumtaz et al. (2022).