Parameter-Based Multi-Channel Audio Panning for Multi-View Broadcasting Systems

In this paper, we propose a multi-channel audio panning method based on the MPEG surround spatial parameters for multi-view broadcasting systems. Multi-channel audio panning techniques are necessary for realistic broadcasting services based on multi-view cameras, where delivering multi-channel audio can increase realism. The proposed audio panning method is composed of two parts. The first part is an enhanced channel level difference (CLD)-based audio panning method to overcome problems of a conventional CLD based panning method. The second part is an interchannel correlation (ICC)-based audio panning method to improve the localization performance of panned audio. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, 5.1 channel audio samples belonging to various music genres are used. AMUSHRA test is conducted to objectively evaluate the perceptual quality and measure localization performance using a dummy head. From the experiments, it is shown that the proposed method provides better localization performance than the conventional CLD-based audio panning method.