Tuul Triyason

Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality Measurement on Speex Codec VoIP with Tonal Language Thai

Nowadays, VoIP has become the core of communication over internet in daily life. While, most objective speech measurement researches are based on studies of Western languages. In linguistic way, tonal language is the language that uses tone to distinguish the meaning of the words and widely use in East Asia and South East Asia like Thai, Vietnam and Chinese. In this paper, we investigate the effect of tonal languages on VoIP speech quality with Speex codec. We encoded the speech samples from three different languages English, Thai and Chinese Mandarin with Speex codec and send through IP network with RTP session. Objective Listening Mean Opinion Score (MOS-LQO) which, measure from PESQ is used as an index of speech quality. The PESQ measurement shows average MOS patterns of three languages is not significantly different but Chinese show more fluctuated in standard deviation of each quality mode more than Thai and English.

A Comparative Study of VoIP Quality Measurement from G.711 and G.729 Using PESQ and Thai Speech

This paper presents the study of VoIP quality measurements from two popular codecs, G.711 and G.729, using the methods of Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) and Thai speech. In this study, from four lists of Thai speech, it has been found that G.711 provides better voice quality than G.729 in every condition of packet loss. Also, it has been found that Objective Listening Quality - Mean Opinion Score (MOS-LQO) of male speech is slightly higher than MOS-LQO of female speech, whereas MOS of child speech is the lowest. Then, MOS-LQO values from four Thai speech lists have been compared. Next, MOS-LQO from PESQ of male and female speech at the best condition have been compared with the Subjective Listening Quality Mean Opinion Score (MOS-LQS) from ACR listening tests in another laboratory. Lastly, referring to packet loss effects, objective MOS from PESQ have been compared with subjective MOS from conversation tests. It has been found that there is no significant difference among MOS-LQO from the four Thai speech lists, but it has been found that there is a significant difference between subjective MOS and objective MOS from each codec in each condition. Therefore, one can say that this is evidence that PESQ requires intensive study with Thai speech to modify PESQ for VoIP quality measurement in Thai environments confidently.

IoT Planting: Watering system using mobile application for the elderly

Nowadays, Thailand has become an aged society. The elderlys mental health has decreased resulting from physiological changes. At present, technology has connect everything to the world of the Internet called the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT can be applied to many ways, which can improve the quality of life and reduce spaces between the elderly and technology. In this paper, we studied the situation of the elderly and proposed the IoT Planting which consists of gardening platform prototype with soil moisture, temperature, water sensor, grow light, and Android application for the elderly. An evaluation was performed by Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The result represents that the elderly perceived the usefulness and found that it easy to use contrary to their expectations. Moreover, by reviewing their opinion, it was found out that they have a positive attitude toward our application and willingness to use it.

WiFi indoor positioning with binary search method

Indoor monitoring is one of the prevalent features in smart home contest. This paper provides a new practical approach for indoor position using WiFi. The approach uses the signal strength of a receiver from transmitters to calculate relative distances from the received signal strength. Finally, the position is calculated by applying the Binary Search algorithm and relative distances. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the experimental test-bed on four-corner access points is conducted. The results show that the calculated positions at the border, or near the access points, are accurate. However, the results in the middle have some errors, due to a distance from access points. The preliminary observation shows that the errors came from the limitation of receiver hardware, which can be compensated by adjusting access points topology.

Extending the ITU-T G.1070 Opinion Model to Support Current Generation H.265/HEVC Video Codec

Online video streaming is one of the most promising applications that is being widely used today. Such streaming videos at high definition (HD) resolution or up consume a large network bandwidth. Current generation video codecs like H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and VP9 are expected to reduce this bandwidth requirement while providing an excellent viewing quality. ITU-T has developed a standardized parametric opinion model called G.1070 that tries to assess the Quality of Experience (QoE) of any multimedia content. The model outputs an overall multimedia quality Mq which is a combination of the video quality Vq and speech quality Sq. The function Vq has to be validated for different video codecs and formats by carrying out subjective experiments. In this paper we propose for the first time a set of coefficients that enables us to extend the G.1070 opinion model to support the H.265 video codec at full-HD resolution.

Smart Healthcare: Basic health check-up and monitoring system for elderly

Thailand has become an ageing society. The consequences of the situation appear to be an issue for health organizations to prepare efficient, safe and equitable health care for an aging population. Throughout the past decades, technology has been frequently utilized because it has provided new methods to support the facilitate health care services. In this paper, we studied the health situation of the elderly and proposed the Smart Healthcare system. It consists of a bio-signal measuring prototype (blood pressure, heart rate and temperature) and a web application for both doctors and the elderly. It also includes an alert button. Evaluation was performed in two parts, which were qualitative interviewing and quantitative survey. We interviewed three doctors for confirmation regarding their opinion of the system (i.e. usefulness, visualizing data, and suggestions). Doctors replied that the system is useful for the elderly who are unaware of their own health information; consequently, they may unable to control their own health. For visualizing data, doctors normally view the measured data in number format. For displaying result to the elderly, it should be explained in simple statements that are easy to understand or described using color. Moreover, provision of an alert button is a valuable idea for saving lives. For the quantitative survey, we used the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as the core model to measure the acceptance by the elderly. Thirty 60–80-year-old elderly people participated in the survey. The result indicated that the elderly is perceived the usefulness of the system and were willing to use it unless they found it difficult to learn or understand because of possible negative attitudes toward new technologies.

VoIP quality of experience: Comparison of VoIP quality from social networking applications based on the best efforts

This paper presents comparison of VoIP quality from four VoIP applications, Kakao, Line, Skype and Viber. This study was conducted with Thai and English speech files over a broadband network in one province near Bangkok based on the best efforts before gathering the degraded speech files. Then, those files have been processed using Perceptual Evaluation Speech Quality Technique (PESQ) in order to obtain the VoIP quality values called MOS, which stands for mean opinion score. It has been found that there is no significant difference between three of the VoIP applications with a slight difference for Kakao over LINE over Skype. While Viber provides the lowest VoIP quality when compared to the other VoIP application obviously. The major contribution of this work is the first evidence that surprisingly reports VoIP quality with slight difference from Kakao over Skype and LINE, two major players in this arena.

Effect of Codec Bit Rate and Packet Loss on Thai Speech Recognition over IP

Nowadays, VoIP has become the core communications on the internet. One of the crucial applications on VoIP is the automated IVR system that interacts with the user automatically. Speech recognition plays an important role behind this kind of system. This paper studies the effect of codec bit rate and network packet loss on Thai speech recognition systems over an IP network. We encoded the speech samples of male, female and artificial voice with various bit rates of Speex codec. The speech sample was sent by RTP through the IP network with packet loss simulation. The speech quality was measured by PESQ and compared to word error rate of speech recognition. The results show that the codec bit rate and level of packet loss have a significant impact on the performance of speech recognition over IP.

A Survey of Standardized Approaches towards the Quality of Experience Evaluation for Video Services: An ITU Perspective

Over the past few years there has been an exponential increase in the amount of multimedia data being streamed over the Internet. At the same time, we are also witnessing a change in the way quality of any particular service is interpreted, with more emphasis being given to the end-users. Thus, silently there has been a paradigm shift from the traditional Quality of Service approach (QoS) towards a Quality of Experience (QoE) model while evaluating the service quality. A lot of work that tries to evaluate the quality of audio, video, and multimedia services over the Internet has been done. At the same time, research is also going on trying to map the two different domains of quality metrics, i.e., the QoS and QoE domain. Apart from the work done by individual researchers, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has been quite active in this area of quality assessment. This is obvious from the large number of ITU standards that are available for different application types. The sheer variety of techniques being employed by ITU as well as other researchers sometimes tends to be too complex and diversified. Although there are survey papers that try to present the current state of the art methodologies for video quality evaluation, none has focused on the ITU perspective. In this work, we try to fill up this void by presenting up-to-date information on the different measurement methods that are currently being employed by ITU for a video streaming scenario. We highlight the outline of each method with sufficient detail and try to analyze the challenges being faced along with the direction of future research.

Hybrid Cloud Architecture for Connected Thai Government Agency

Currently, the IT infrastructure architecture of Thai government agencies mostly use the silo-based design. This is because IT budgets were granted for projects where the application software and hardware are bundled together. It causes difficulty for data center resources to be shared across multiple projects, leading to inefficient resource utilization and the lack of data integration. Since data integration is the core concept of Thailands IT strategy, cloud computing is a cutting-edge technology that focuses on resource sharing and seamless data integration. However, there lacks evident research about a cloud architecture that is suitable for Thai government agencies because the limitations of Thai government policies and a wide variety of cloud services in Thailand. Henceforth, the purpose of this work aims to study and compare existing cloud architectures and its services in terms of security, privacy, pricing, flexibility, reliability, and management. The study also attempts to design and define the Hybrid Community Cloud model in order to apply cloud computing as a blueprint for Thai government agencies. The result of this study indicated that the proposed model appears to be the most appropriate model for government agencies in Thailand. Moreover, this study also presents the implementation of the hybrid model for the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security of Thailand.