Spatio-Temporal Windowing for Encoding Perceptually Salient Early Reflections in Parametric Spatial Audio Rendering

Parametric spatial audio rendering aims to provide perceptually convincing audio cues
that are agnostic to the playback system to enable the acoustic design of games and virtual
reality. The authors propose an algorithm for detecting perceptually important reflections
from spatial room impulse responses. First, a parametric representation of the sound field is
derived based on perceptually motivated spatio-temporal windowing, followed by a second
step that estimates the perceptual salience of the detected reflections by means of a masking
threshold. In this work, a vertical dependency is incorporated into both these components.
This was inspired by recent research revealing that two sound sources in the median plane
can evoke two independent auditory events if their spatial separation is sufficiently large. The
proposed algorithm is evaluated in nine simulated shoebox rooms with a wide range of sizes
and reverberation times. Evaluation results show improved selection of early reflections by
accounting for source elevation and suggest that for speech signals, the perceptual quality
increases with an increasing number of rendered early reflections.