Parametric Time-Frequency Domain Spatial Audio

15 Parametric Spatial Audio Techniques in Teleconferencing and Remote Presence

Anastasios Alexandridis, Despoina Pavlidi, Nikolaos Stefanakis, and Athanasios Mouchtaris

Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, Institute of Computer Science (FORTH-ICS), Heraklion, Crete, Greece

15.1 Introduction and Motivation

In this chapter, applications of time–frequency parametric spatial audio techniques are presented in the areas of teleconferencing and remote presence. Specifically, the focus is on using circular microphone arrays in order to capture the sound field in these two different application areas. The methods presented here, consequently, have the scope to process multi-microphone signals so that the spatial properties of the original sound field can be reproduced using a multichannel loudspeaker setup or headphones as faithfully as possible, keeping as a priority computational efficiency, so that the proposed approaches can be implemented in real time using a typical PC processor.

The approaches presented are not simply extensions of established work into particular application areas, but are based on algorithms that are novel and innovative. It is relevant at this point to explain the main difference between the two application areas examined in this chapter. On the one hand, teleconference applications typically involve a small number of simultaneous sound sources at each remote participant site (the speakers at a given time instant), and the objective is to estimate ...