scope:

The present document aims to identify and define testing methodologies which can be used to objectively evaluate the performance of narrowband and wideband terminals and systems for speech communication in the presence of background noise.

Background noise is a problem in mostly all situations and conditions and need to be taken into account in both, terminals and networks. The present document provides information about the testing methods applicable to objectively evaluate the speech quality in the presence of background noise. The present document includes:

• The description of the experts post evaluation process chosen to select the subjective test data being within the scope of the objective methods.

• The results of the performance evaluation of the currently existing methods described in Recommendations ITU-T P.862 [i.16] and P.862.1 [i.17] and in TOSQA2001 [i.19] which is chosen for the evaluation of terminals in the framework of ETSI VoIP speech quality test events [i.8], [i.9], [i.10] and [i.11].

• The method which is applicable to objectively determine the different parameters influencing the speech quality in the presence of background noise taking into account:

- the speech quality;

- the background noise transmission quality;

- the overall quality.

• The present document is to be used in conjunction with:

- ETSI ES 202 396-1 [i.1] which describes a recording and reproduction setup for realistic simulation of background noise scenarios in lab-type environments for the performance evaluation of terminals and communication systems.

- ETSI EG 202 396-2 [i.2] which describes the simulation of network impairments and how to simulate realistic transmission network scenarios and which contains the methodology and results of the subjective scoring for the data forming the basis of the present document.

- French speech sentences as defined in Recommendation ITU-T P.501 [i.13] for wideband and English speech sentences as defined in Recommendation ITU-T P.501 [i.13] for narrowband.