In October 2018, local digital radio was launched to cover the agglomeration of Wroclaw. The implementation of this undertaking required many tests, including qualitative ones, that refer to both music and speech. This paper presents the results of subjective tests based on the evaluation of speech quality of signals recorded at various points in Wroclaw. Measurements were carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the International Telecommunication Union as well as in ordinary acoustic conditions in listeners’ flats. The rating was made for male and female voices. The most important conclusion is that for speech signal assessment in meaning of the quality the test conditions do not influence the obtained results. The other fact confirmed in the experiment was that the receiving place of DAB+ signal in the Single-Frequency Network also does not affect the perceived voice quality.

This article provides a comparison of a three methods that can be used for calculating effective coverage of image quality assessment database. The aim of this metric is to show how well the database is filled with variety of images. For each image in the database the Spatial Information (SI) and Colorfulness (CF) metric is calculated. The area of convex hull containing all the points on SI x CF plane is indication of total coverage of the database, but it does not show how efficiently this area is utilized. For this purpose an effective coverage was introduced. An analysis is performed for 16 databases - 13 publicaly available and 3 artificial created for the purpose of showing advantages of the effective coverage.

In this paper, the results of the analyses of selected chemical water quality parameters and taxonomic composition of macroinvcrtcbratcs of the Liwiec River and its chosen tributaries (central-eastern Poland) arc presented. Chemical and biological water quality assessment was performed, and four biotic indices were tested: Belgian BBi, French IBGN, British BMWP/OQR, and biotic index BMWP-PL developed for Polish rivers. Correlations between the values of the latter and chemical water parameters show that BMWP-PL is a useful tool for the assessment ofwater quality of lowland rivers in Poland (similar to the Liwiec).

The multi-stimulus test with hidden reference and anchors (MUSHRA) is commonly used for subjective quality assessment of audio systems. Despite its wide acceptance in scientific and industrial sectors, the method is not free from bias. One possible source of bias in the MUSHRA method may be attributed to a graphical design of its user interface. This paper examines the hypothesis that replacement of the standard multi-slider layout with a single-slider version could reduce a stimulus spacing bias observed in the MUSHRA test. Contrary to the expectation, the aforementioned modification did not reduce the bias. This outcome formally supports the validity of using multiple sliders in the MUSHRA graphical interface.

Changes in river channel morphological parameters are influenced by anthropogenic factors, such as climatic changes, river catchment management changes, and hydrotechnical development of rivers. To assess the intensity of individual pressures and the resulting changes in abiotic and biotic factors in the riverbed, water quality monitoring is conducted, including the assessment of the hydromorphological status. The assessment can be based on the River Habitat Survey (RHS) which is a synthetic method that includes the evaluation of habitat character and river quality based on their morphological structure.
The input data, which characterise any river include physical features of hydrotechnical structures, bed granulation, occurrence of bedforms, visible morphodynamic phenomena, and a sediment transport pattern. The RHS method allows to determine two quantitative indices used to evaluate the hydromorphological status: Habitat Modification Score ( HMS), which determines the extent of transformation in the morphology of a watercourse, and Habitat Quality Assessment ( HQA), which is based on the presence and diversity of natural elements in a watercourse and river valley.
The proposed method can be divided into three stages. The first assesses the river section hydromorphological indices, describing the degree of technical modification ( HMS) and the ecological quality of the reach ( HQA), using the RHS method. The second stage describes morphological changes resulting from the technical regulation and estimates indices for the regulated reach. Finally, we compare HQA and HMS indices before and after the regulation. This comparison is described by numerical indicators and related to reference values.

The impact of civil engineering course education on civil engineers is profound and crucial. Due to the hierarchical and ambiguous nature of quality assessment for flipped classroom teaching, there is an urgent demand for a rational and effective approach to conduct such assessments. This would enable the targeted formulation of instructional improvement methods based on assessment outcomes, ultimately elevating the quality of pedagogy. This study combines the analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy evaluation method. The fuzzy evaluation method is utilized to identify four primary evaluation factor sets, fourteen secondary judgment factor sets, and five evaluation outcome sets, with subsequent quantification of the assessment results. The analytic hierarchy process is employed to ascertain the weight coefficients of the evaluation factors. The comprehensive assessment model for flipped classroom teaching quality is established. The assessment results indicate that the overall quality of flipped classroom teaching in the civil engineering major at Anhui University of Science and Technology, conducted through the platform of Superstar Learning Hub, falls within the ‘Good’ category. The fuzzy comprehensive evaluation score for extracurricular learning quality is the lowest, and the weight proportion attributed to flipped classroom infrastructure is the highest. Consequently, several targeted improvement measures are proposed to enhance the quality of flipped classroom teaching.

Most of the existing algorithms for the objective audio quality assessment are intrusive, as they require access both to an unimpaired reference recording and an evaluated signal. This feature excludes them from many practical applications. In this paper, we introduce a non-intrusive audio quality assessment method. The proposed method is intended to account for audio artefacts arising from the lossy compression of music signals. During its development, 250 high-quality uncompressed music recordings were collated. They were subsequently processed using the selection of five popular audio codecs, resulting in the repository of 13,000 audio excerpts representing various levels of audio quality. The proposed non-intrusive method was trained with the data obtained employing a well-established intrusive model (ViSQOL v3). Next, the performance of the trained model was evaluated utilizing the quality scores obtained in the subjective listening tests undertaken remotely over the Internet. The listening tests were carried out in compliance with the MUSHRA recommendation (ITU-R BS.1534-3). In this study, the following three convolutional neural networks were compared: (1) a model employing 1D convolutional filters, (2) an Inception-based model, and (3) a VGG-based model. The last-mentioned model outperformed the model employing 1D convolutional filters in terms of predicting the scores from the listening tests, reaching a correlation value of 0.893. The performance of the Inceptionbased model was similar to that of the VGG-based model. Moreover, the VGG-based model outperformed the method employing a stacked gated-recurrent-unit-based deep learning framework, recently introduced by Mumtaz et al. (2022).