Audio is a key component of immersive multimedia applications. Beyond simply communicating information to the user through speech, music, and other context-specific sound, the audio and acoustics can serve to convey a sense of spatial awareness and presence. This is particularly important in the context of mixed reality, where virtual content is presented spatially to the user to augment or enhance the real environment.
Recent advances in machine listening and audio analysis proved successful at extracting information about the environment, e.g., by performing acoustic scene analysis, estimating acoustic parameters for spatially positioning virtual acoustic objects, or localizing sound sources and events. The availability of this type of information has the potential to greatly improve the user experience in immersive multimedia applications. Examples include providing real-time feedback about the surroundings, automatically suppressing or enhancing specific sounds, and altering the spatial information of spatially rendered content for artistic purposes or to better blend it with the real environment.
The scope of this special session is to explore this intersection between computational audio intelligence and immersive audio research, and provide a venue for hosting recent advances in these two audio research directions. This will create the opportunity for scientific interaction that can significantly bolster research in both computational audio intelligence and immersive audio from a joint perspective.
The special session targets researchers and professionals working in computational audio intelligence and immersive audio processing, and in particular focusing on applications which synergically exploit techniques related to these research fields.
The topics of the special session include (but are not limited to):