Quality of service evaluation for spatial audio coding and processing systems

This collaborative project will undertake basic research leading to a means of measuring the perceived spatial quality of sound processing equipment in an objective fashion. This will enable the automatic evaluation of degradations in spatial quality, as compared with an unimpaired reference. Such a system needs to be able to evaluate the quality of spatial sound reproduced by arbitrary rendering formats and loudspeaker layouts, so the research is based on the idea of modelling and evaluating the reproduced sound field at the listening position rather than measuring the reproduced audio signals themselves. This is needed because current standards for audio quality measurement do not take spatial factors into account.Test signals and perceptually relevant measurements will be designed to evaluate the spatial performance of the device under test followed by the prediction of a perceptual 'difference grade' between a reference spatial audio representation and an impaired representation. This requires the mapping of objective measurements to listening test results and the development of context-senstive statistical models that take into account the type of programme material involved.