Quality Evaluation of Spatial Transmission and Reproduction by an Artificial Listener (QESTRAL)

EPSRC Project Reference: EP/D041244/1
Start date: April 2006

Principal Investigator: Dr Francis Rumsey
Co-investigators: Dr Slawek Zielinski, Dr Philip Jackson
Research Assistant: Dr Martin Dewhirst
Research Student: Dr Robert Conetta
Thesis Supervisor: Dr Tim Brookes
Industrial partners: Prof Søren Bech, Bang & Olufsen, Denmark. David Meares, BBC Research and Development

Project aims

To develop a set of test signals and related physical measures that can be used to evaluate the performance of spatial audio processing systems in relation to a range of perceptually important spatial quality attributes of a reference system;

To model the reproduced sound field generated by selected transducer arrays at a number of monitoring positions within a listening space;

To develop a meaningful way of representing the perceptual spatial quality of service (SQoS) of the device under test (DUT), based on the aforementioned spatial quality attributes;

To develop a demonstrator capable of mapping SQoS measures to subjective ratings of real programme material, in such a way as to minimise the error between predicted and actual ratings of spatial quality.