Patent ID: 8655656

Claim:
A method for assessing intelligibility of speech represented by a speech signal, the method comprising: receiving a speech signal; performing a feature extraction on a frame of the speech signal so as to obtain a feature vector for each of the frame of the speech signal, wherein the feature extraction comprises: performing a Discrete Fourier Transform on the frame; discarding phase information of the frame; smoothing an amplitude spectrum of the frame so as to emphasize perceptually meaningful frequencies; and transforming spectral vectors by applying a Discrete Cosine Transform; and wherein the feature vector comprises a plurality of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC)-based features, derivates of the plurality of MFCC-based features, and second derivates of the plurality of MFCC-based features; concatenating the feature vector with a plurality of feature vectors from temporally adjacent frames of the speech signal so as to form a concatenated feature vector; inputting the concatenated feature vector to a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and obtaining from the MLP a vector of phoneme posterior probabilities of different phonemes for the frame of the speech signal; performing an entropy estimation on the vector of phoneme posterior probabilities of so as to evaluate intelligibility of the frame of the speech signal; and outputting an intelligibility measure for the speech signal based on averaging the entropy estimation of the frame of the speech signal with entropy estimations of other frames of the speech signal.