MaskSound: Exploring Sound Masking Approaches to Support People with Autism in Managing Noise Sensitivity

LEED interior design and construction projects IEQ acoustical credits are particularly difficult to achieve due to broad scope requirements and restrictive credit language. Specifically, the high composite sound transmission requirement between private offices and hallways. DLR Group acoustical staff proposed an alternative compliance path and evaluation focused on lower STC rated partitions with the addition of sound masking systems to increase the background noise levels, with the goal of achieving an equivalent level of speech privacy between offices and hallways. Speech Privacy Class as detailed in ASTM E2638-10 was used as the evaluation metric. Difficulties in analysis and design stage assessment included unknown level difference of constructed partitions and entry doors, correlating subjective Client expectations to objective SPC ratings, and Client sign-off on sound masking approach. Post-construction measurements were conducted before and after sound masking system installation. Significant improvements in objective SPC ratings were measured, although targeted design goal SPC ratings were not achieved in all cases. Measured noise level differences of the glass storefront office partitions and measured sound masking noise spectra were compared to design stage values for further process refinement. Completed space measurement results and design stage comparisons will be reviewed and discussed.

Individuals may vary in their sensitivity to noise and this may affect how they relate to their surroundings. As part of an intervention project about the psychosocial effects of informational sound masking, we examined the occurrence of self-labeled noise sensitive individuals as well as the association between three indicators of noise sensitivity and one indicator for the perceived enjoyment of working in an open office environment. We also examined how the indicators of noise sensitivity correlated with age, gender and ratings of behavioural and architectural countermeasures, and the perceived impact of the sound environment on work tasks. Sixty-eight individuals (32 women and 35 men) between 24 and 64 years of age participated by responding to an online questionnaire at baseline in March 2023. The results showed that 47 % labeled themselves as at least being somewhat sensitive to sounds, while 53 % stated that they were not especially, or not at all, sensitive to sounds. Furthermore, 57 % reported that they much, or to a high degree, enjoyed working in an open office environment, whereas 43 % reported that they did not, or only to some extent enjoyed this. Spearman rank order correlations indicated that individuals who labeled themselves as noise sensitive, or reported having a propensity to react very strongly to sounds, were more likely to report a lesser enjoyment of working in an open office environment. In addition, they were also more likely to rate that the sound environment negatively influenced their ability to concentrate and to perform at work. Accordingly, individual variations in sound sensitivity is one factor to consider when designing and operating open office environments; and may also be a factor that impacts the recruitment of individuals to employments in open office environments.

A cubic unsharp masking technique for contrast enhancement

An image sharpening algorithm based on fuzzy logic

A watermarking scheme designed for remote sensing images needs to meet the same demand of both invisibility as for ordinary digital images. Due to specific perceptual characteristics of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, the watermarking algorithms with consideration of Human Vision System (HVS) modeling from optical images give poor performance when applied on SAR images. This paper examines a variety of factors affecting the noise sensitivity, and further proposes a refined pixel-wise masking approach for watermarking on SAR images. The proposed approach is applied on logarithmic transformed SAR images, and has increased the acceptable watermark embedding strength by about 6 dB to 10 dB while achieving the same levels of watermarked image visual quality. Experimental results show that this approach enhanced the perceptual invisibility of watermarking based on wavelet decomposition.