Impact of Compression on the Performance of the Room Impulse Response Interpolation Approach to Spatial Audio Synthesis
Publication Name
Proceedings of 2022 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, APSIPA ASC 2022
Abstract
In Virtual Reality (VR) an application where a user is able to move freely in the virtual or physical environment, the 3D sound scene reproduced over headphones, including the acoustic Room Impulse Response (RIR) must be constantly updated. Storing and transmitting the RIR for every possible source and listening position is impractical and hence efficient compression is required. This paper investigates compression and interpolation approaches for synthesising the RIR at new listening positions using a discrete set of compressed directional RIRs (DRIRs) recorded with an Ambisonics B-format microphone. The predicted sound quality and localisation accuracy of Ambisonic sound scenes derived using interpolated, compressed RIRs is based on the Neural Similarity Index Measure (NSIM) applied to the time-frequency phase information derived from reference and synthesised B-format channels and as used in the AMBIQUAL objective spatial audio quality metric. Results show a strong correlation between the compression bitrate and the objective quality scores of B-format Ambisonics audios including interpolated and ground truth DRIRs.
Open Access Status
This publication is not available as open access
First Page
442
Last Page
448
Funding Number
22ZH1200
Funding Sponsor
University College Dublin