QuARTCS: A Tool Enabling End-to-Any Speech Quality Assessment of WebRTC-Based Calls

• Published in: Speech and Computer Vol. 11096; pp. 408 - 418
• Main Authors: Meszaros, Martin, Trojahn, Franziska, Maruschke, Michael, Jokisch, Oliver
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2018; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Audio quality assessment; Opus codec; VoIP; WebRTC
• ISBN: 3319995782; 9783319995786
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-99579-3_43

Recently, the use of Web Real-Time Communication (Web-RTC) technology in communication applications has been increasing significantly. The users of IP-based telephony require excellent audio quality. However, in WebRTC-based audio calls the audio assessment is challenging due to the specific functioning principles of WebRTC, such as security requirements, diversity of the endpoints and varying client implementations. In this article, we illustrate the challenges in established methods of audio quality assessment with regard to WebRTC and discuss necessary modifications in the measurement technique. We present Quality Analyzer for Real Time Communication Scenarios (QuARTCS) as a novel method to overcome the measurement shortcomings and demonstrate the basic functioning by preliminary call samples.