A new version of ITU-T Rec. P.863 POLQA is included in MultiDSLA v5.1.2 onwards. It contains some bug fixes and improvements. The version of POLQA is that which is referenced in the standard. MultiDSLA has contained v1.1 for some time. It now has v2.4 as well.

When ITU-T Rec. P.863 POLQA was originally released it contained some undesirable features and behaviours that differed from ITU-T Rec. P.862 PESQ. They were discussed in several articles.

The first one described an issue with long speech files using POLQA NB. This has been resolved in v2.4.

The second article discussed the Transparency problem. POLQA v2.4 exhibits less of a transparency problem in the NB model but the SWB model has not been improved significantly.

The third article looked at the tendency for POLQA v1.1 to show odd variations in the time offset between the reference and degraded files.  This behaviour is much improved in v2.4.

The final article in the series looked at the principles of time alignment which remain unchanged in v2.4.

When you install MultiDSLA v5.1.2 you will see that all POLQA Node Configs have been upgraded to use POLQA v2.4 automatically. You can change the Node Config to use v1.1 instead, if you wish. In the Report Profiles, you will see that there are options to report v1.1 and v2.4 results.

Additional speech material has been added to ITU-T Rec. P.501 in Annex C. This material has been incorporated in the new release of MultiDSLA along with the appropriate tasklists. Upgrading with the installer (.msi) file will include the P.501C English speech files and tasklists. A language pack including Chinese, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Italian and Japanese material is included in the full installation (.iso) file. Instructions for incorporating the speech files and tasklists are to be found in the Getting Started Guide and online Manual.

Later articles will look at the performance of the new version of POLQA in more detail.