Auditory Localization in Low-Bitrate Compressed Ambisonic Scenes

The increasing popularity of Ambisonics as a spatial audio format for streaming services poses new challenges to existing audio coding techniques. Immersive audio delivered to mobile devices requires an efficient bitrate compression that does not affect the spatial quality of the content. Good local...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied sciences 2019-07, Vol.9 (13), p.2618
Main Authors: Rudzki, Tomasz, Gomez-Lanzaco, Ignacio, Stubbs, Jessica, Skoglund, Jan, Murphy, Damian T., Kearney, Gavin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
ambisonics
audio codec
auditory localization
binaural
bitrate compression
Coding standards
Ears & hearing
Headphones
listening tests
Localization
opus
Perceptions
perceptual evaluation
Signal processing
Sound fields
Sound sources
spatial audio
Spatial discrimination
Spatial resolution
Spherical harmonics
streaming
Virtual reality
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Summary:The increasing popularity of Ambisonics as a spatial audio format for streaming services poses new challenges to existing audio coding techniques. Immersive audio delivered to mobile devices requires an efficient bitrate compression that does not affect the spatial quality of the content. Good localizability of virtual sound sources is one of the key elements that must be preserved. This study was conducted to investigate the localization precision of virtual sound source presentations within Ambisonic scenes encoded with Opus low-bitrate compression at different bitrates and Ambisonic orders (1st, 3rd, and 5th). The test stimuli were reproduced over a 50-channel spherical loudspeaker configuration and binaurally using individually measured and generic Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs). Participants were asked to adjust the position of a virtual acoustic pointer to match the position of virtual sound source within the bitrate-compressed Ambisonic scene. Results show that auditory localization in low-bitrate compressed Ambisonic scenes is not significantly affected by codec parameters. The key factors influencing localization are the rendering method and Ambisonic order truncation. This suggests that efficient perceptual coding might be successfully used for mobile spatial audio delivery.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app9132618