Development of an estimation model for instantaneous presence in audio content

The sense of presence is often used to evaluate the performances of audio content and systems. To estimate the overall presence of a content item, we have developed estimation models for the sense of presence in audio-only and audio-visual content. In this study, the audio-only model is expanded to estimate the instantaneous presence in an audio content item. Initially, we conducted an evaluation experiment of the presence with 40 content items to investigate the relationship between the features of the audio content and the instantaneous presence. Based on the experimental data, a neural-network-based model was developed by expanding the previous model. To express the variation in instantaneous presence, six features, which were extracted from the content items in 500-ms intervals, were used as inputs for the model. A generalization test confirmed that the model is sufficiently accurate to estimate the instantaneous presence.