Salience of spatial attributes on quality evaluation of multichannel audio processing devices

Abstract

Objective quality assessment methods for audio signal processing devices, e.g. ITU-R BS.1387-1, measure perceived quality by using various types of test excerpts and incorporating a number of psychoacoustic metrics for evaluating various attributes of quality degradations. As many multichannel audio processing devices are being developed, recent quality assessment methods include not only timbral features but also spatial features, such as analysis on interaural disparities. In this paper, the importance of the newly proposed spatial - interaural - features are studied for different types of multichannel test signals. The spatial features have bigger salience on directly recorded sound sources than artificially manipulated multichannel contents.