Meeting Topic: Quality Assessment for Compressed Ambisonic Audio
Moderator Name: Andrew Hines
Speaker Name: Dr. Andrew Hines
Other business or activities at the meeting: Election of Officers, Adoption of Section Laws, Meeting planning, Allocate roles and tasks, Sponsorship/Funding
Meeting Location: University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Spatial audio with a high degree of sound quality and accurate localization is essential for creating a sense of immersion in a virtual environment. VR content creators can use spatial audio to attract the audiences attention in relation to their story or to guide the audience through a narrative in VR, relying on hearing something to focus our attention before we see it. Delivering spatial audio over networks requires efficient encoding techniques that could compress the raw audio content without compromising quality. Lossy compression schemes such as Opus typically reduce the amount of data to be sent by discarding some information. This discarded information can be important for ambisonic spatial audio in regards to listening quality or localization accuracy. Streaming service providers such as YouTube typically transcode uploaded content into various bit rates and need a perceptually relevant audio quality metric to monitor users' perceived quality and spatial localization accuracy. This talk will present subjective listening test experiments that explore the effect of Opus codec compression on the quality as perceived by listeners. It will also introduce a full reference objective spatial audio quality metric, AMBIQUAL, which derives both listening quality and localization accuracy metrics directly from the spatial audio B-format ambisonic audio.
