The first AES Ireland Section meeting will take place in room B1.09 in the Computer Science building at UCD on Friday, February 15th. This meeting will begin with a lecture at 17:00 by Dr. Andrew Hines (details below) followed by the first AGM at 18:00.
If anyone would like to put themselves forward for election to any of the committee roles, please contact Enda Bates (e.bates@tcd.ie). Please note: you must be an AES member to qualify for these roles but non-members are welcome to attend.
Speaker: Dr Andrew Hines, Assistant Professor, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin (qxlab.ucd.ie)
Title: Quality Assessment for Compressed Ambisonic Audio
Description:
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.