Using Kurtosis for Objective Assessment of the Musical Signals Clipping Degree

Abstract

When transmitting music signals via infocommunication channels, there is a risk of distortion of these signals due to clipping. The consequence of these distortions is a decrease in subjective assessments of the quality of musical signals, so clipping detection is an important issue. In this paper, the kurtosis and the inverse value of kurtosis are proposed as measures of an objective assessment of the musical signals clipping degree. Matching maps of objective and subjective clipping degree estimates are monotonic functions that do not contain sharp kinks, which allow not only evaluating clipping degree, but also estimating music signals quality. An important advantage of the proposed measures of the clipping degree is the ability to simplify and speed up significantly the calculations due to the absence of the need of preliminarily estimation the probability density function of the analyzed musical signal.