A new approach for spatial audio quality assessment

The rising interest toward multichannel audio systems capable of conveying and creating spatial and immersive audio scenes puts focus on how the quality of such systems should be evaluated. Through the study of the existing audio quality assessment techniques, we highlight the missing aspects regarding the analysis of spatial cues, and we introduce our approach to resolve that using a natural, inexpensive and fast gesture-based technique for subjective assessment, built around the Kinect sensor. The results are quite satisfying with an overall accuracy of less than 5°, and enable us to establish more reliable subjective and objective methods. A benchmark of some well-known HRTF databases using this protocol is presented to illustrate the usefulness and efficiency of this approach.