arXiv subjects

Thomas Biberger

Publications and source records attributed to Thomas Biberger.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Towards predicting binaural audio quality in listeners with normal and impaired hearing

Eurich et al. (2024) recently introduced the computationally efficient monaural and binaural audio quality model (eMoBi-Q). This model integrates both monaural and binaural auditory features and has been validated across six audio datasets encompassing quality ratings for music and speech, processed via algorithms commonly employed in modern hearing devices (e.g., acoustic transparency, feedback cancellation, and binaural beamforming) or presented via loudspeakers. In the current study, we expand eMoBi-Q to account for perceptual effects of sensorineural hearing loss (HL) on audio quality. For this, the model was extended by a nonlinear auditory filterbank. Given that altered loudness perception is a prevalent issue among listeners with hearing impairment, our goal is to incorporate loudness as a sub-dimension for predicting audio quality in both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired populations. While predicting loudness itself is important in the context of loudness-based hearing aid fitting, loudness as audio quality sub-measure may be helpful for the selection of reliable auditory features in hearing impaired listeners. The parameters of the filterbank and subsequent processing stages were informed by the physiologically-based (binaural) loudness model proposed by Pieper et al. (2018). This study presents and discusses the initial implementation of the extended binaural quality model.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2021

Effect of acoustic scene complexity and visual scene representation on auditory perception in virtual audio-visual environments

In daily life, social interaction and acoustic communication often take place in complex acoustic environments (CAE) with a variety of interfering sounds and reverberation. For hearing research and the evaluation of hearing systems, simulated CAEs using virtual reality techniques have gained interest in the context of ecological validity. In the current study, the effect of scene complexity and visual representation of the scene on psychoacoustic measures like sound source location, distance perception, loudness, speech intelligibility, and listening effort in a virtual audio-visual environment was investigated. A 3-dimensional, 86-channel loudspeaker array was used to render the sound field in combination with or without a head-mounted display (HMD) to create an immersive stereoscopic visual representation of the scene. The scene consisted of a ring of eight (virtual) loudspeakers which played a target speech stimulus and nonsense speech interferers in several spatial conditions. Either an anechoic (snowy outdoor scenery) or echoic environment (loft apartment) with a reverberation time (T60) of about 1.5 s was simulated. In addition to varying the number of interferers, scene complexity was varied by assessing the psychoacoustic measures in isolated consecutive measurements orcsimultaneously. Results showed no significant effect of wearing the HMD on the data. Loudness and distance perception showed significantly different results when they were measured simultaneously instead of consecutively in isolation. The advantage of the suggested setup is that it can be directly transferred to a corresponding real room, enabling a 1:1 comparison and verification of the perception experiments in the real and virtual environment.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2021

Towards a generalized monaural and binaural auditory model for psychoacoustics and speech intelligibility

Auditory perception involves cues in the monaural auditory pathways as well as binaural cues based on differences between the ears. So far auditory models have often focused on either monaural or binaural experiments in isolation. Although binaural models typically build upon stages of (existing) monaural models, only a few attempts have been made to extend a monaural model by a binaural stage using a unified decision stage for monaural and binaural cues. In such approaches, a typical prototype of binaural processing has been the classical equalization-cancelation mechanism, which either involves signal-adaptive delays and provides a single channel output or can be implemented with tapped delays providing a high-dimensional multichannel output. This contribution extends the (monaural) generalized envelope power spectrum model by a non-adaptive binaural stage with only a few, fixed output channels. The binaural stage resembles features of physiologically motivated hemispheric binaural processing, as simplified signal processing stages, yielding a 5-channel monaural and binaural matrix feature "decoder" (BMFD). The back end of the existing monaural model is applied to the 5-channel BMFD output and calculates short-time envelope power and power features. The model is evaluated and discussed for a baseline database of monaural and binaural psychoacoustic experiments from the literature.

eess.AS↗