Patent ID: 8560312

Claim:
A method for performing speech quality assessment of a speech signal, the speech signal received from a speech communications network, the method comprising: receiving a speech signal from the speech communications network; applying an impulse noise detector to the speech signal to detect impulsive noise contained in the speech signal during active speech portions thereof; and performing speech quality assessment of the speech signal based on the detection of impulsive noise in the speech signal during active speech portions thereof by the impulse noise detector; wherein the step of applying the impulse noise detector to the speech signal comprises: applying an inverse filter to the speech signal to generate a residual signal thereof, the inverse filter having been derived based on an autoregressive model of the speech signal; and applying a threshold detector to the residual signal to identify the presence of impulsive noise in the speech signal, wherein the presence of impulsive noise is identified based on the residual signal and on a statistical variance thereof.