Final Thesis

Master Thesis of Reimers, Carolin

Current research regarding the transmission and reproduction of immersive contents has lead to the development of several new standards. Since a big field of application is entertainment and gaming, the interest for methods to describe and evaluate the perceptual quality assessment of 3D audio reproduction via headphones rises. A well-known method for the reproduction via headphones is using an Ambisonics-based binaural synthesis which brings a variety of possible influencing factors like the HRTF used and the Ambisonics order to name just a few. This thesis’ goal is to propose a suitable evaluation method which considers common limiting factors of reproduced sounds. In order to do that current research was analysed and investigated regarding the requirement of a headphonebased rendering. The resulting questionnnaire was evaluated by conducting a pretest. As one aim was to investigate the influence of different common limitations a number of four manipulations was chosen for the main listening test. The experiment successfully measured the impact of certain manipulations on the chosen quality elements confirming that the proposed questionnaire and test procedure are useful tools for assessing the perceptual quality of 3D audio reproductions via headphones. Xv