Sound Quality Evaluation Based on the Mahalanobis Distance for the Interior Noise of Driving Vehicles with Various the Tire Type

The reduction of vehicle interior noise has been the main interest of NVH engineers. The driver's perception of the vehicle noise is strongly affected by the psychoacoustic characteristics of the noise and the SPL. The existing methods to evaluate the SQ for vehicle interior noise are linear regression analysis of subjective SQ metrics by statistics and the estimation of subjective SQ values by neural network. However, these methods strongly depend on jury tests, this leads to difficulties. To reduce the important of the jury tests, we suggest a new method using the Mahalanobis distance for SQ evaluation. And, the optimal characteristic values that influenced the results of sound quality evaluation on the basis by main effect. Finally, we developed a new method based on the MD method to evaluate sound quality. The result of noise evaluation revealed that the sound quality could be well improved by changing the structural characteristics of the vehicle. �� 2010 The Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers