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Audio Quality Requirements and Comparison of Multimodal vs. Unimodal Perception of Impairments for Long Duration Content

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Abstract

Using our novel methodology for quality evaluation of long duration multimedia content, the effect of the time dimension on quality ratings and user responses is investigated. Particularly, the influence of audio artifacts related to different compression rates on participants’ reactions to quality changes over extended periods of time is examined. Results of the first study suggest that participants’ quality expectations are rather constant throughout the entire duration of the 30-minute long clip, which also holds for subjects’ reaction time to quality degradations. Furthermore, it turns out that the test persons are more sensitive to quality changes when they are able to influence the quality themselves. In addition to the first study, two experiments were conducted in which cross-modal effects between the visual and auditory modality were investigated. The findings indicate that it is significantly easier for participants to discover quality changes when impairments are introduced in both the auditory and visual modality at the same time than when distortions occur in the audio or video domain solely.

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Acknowledgments

This study was performed within the PERCEVAL project, funded by The Research Council of Norway under project number 193034/S10.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway

    Adam Borowiak, Ulrich Reiter & U. Peter Svensson

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  1. Adam Borowiak
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  2. Ulrich Reiter
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  3. U. Peter Svensson
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Correspondence to Adam Borowiak.

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Borowiak, A., Reiter, U. & Svensson, U.P. Audio Quality Requirements and Comparison of Multimodal vs. Unimodal Perception of Impairments for Long Duration Content. J Sign Process Syst 74, 79–89 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-013-0777-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-013-0777-8

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