The rise of immersive technologies has led to an increase in the number of use cases that adapt this type of technology within the telecommunications area. Some examples are: industrial training, multimedia content consumption and tele-training. Among all the immersive technologies, eXtended Reality through the use of Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) is the one that focuses the majority of current developments. Specifically, the Social XR paradigm frames the use of immersive technologies in a multi-user or social context. Among the decisive factors for using immersive technology in communications use cases, two stand out: the possibility of making the user believe that they has been transported to another place (sensation of presence) and the possibility of increasing interactions by allowing displacements through space (6 degrees of freedom) as well as the possibility of interacting in a more natural way. Such improvements are ...

This thesis presents a comprehensive study of the evaluation of the Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived by the users of 3D video systems, analyzing the impact of effects introduced by all the elements of the 3D video processing chain. Therefore, various subjective assessment tests are presented, particularly designed to evaluate the systems under consideration, and taking into account all the perceptual factors related to the 3D visual experience, such as depth perception and visual discomfort. In particular, a subjective test is presented, based on evaluating typical degradations that may appear during the content creation, for instance due to incorrect camera calibration or video processing algorithms (e.g., 2D to 3D conversion). Moreover, the process of generation of a high-quality dataset of 3D stereoscopic videos is described, which is freely available for the research community, and has been already widely used in ...

Provisioning of digital video services is a difficult task as it is hard to estimate optimal settings of video parameters, given transmission constraints, while maximizing the overall end-user quality. With Internet streaming services becoming part of our everyday life, end-to-end optimization of such systems is important. On one hand, huge effort is given into subjective or objective evaluation of the end-user perception. High quality audiovisual perception with respect to the minimized costs of the provided service is one of the main interests for the network providers. On the other hand, subjective evaluations to determine best video and audio configurations are often evaluated in controlled test laboratory environments, which have little to do with the real environments in which consumers enjoy such content. Unfortunately, no serious attempts have been made to take into account interactions between quality of the content and ...

The present doctoral thesis aims towards the development of new long-term, multi-channel, audio-visual processing techniques for the analysis of bioacoustics phenomena. The effort is focused on the study of the physiology of the gastrointestinal system, aiming at the support of medical research for the discovery of gastrointestinal motility patterns and the diagnosis of functional disorders. The term "processing" in this case is quite broad, incorporating the procedures of signal processing, content description, manipulation and analysis, that are applied to all the recorded bioacoustics signals, the auxiliary audio-visual surveillance information (for the monitoring of experiments and the subjects' status), and the extracted audio-video sequences describing the abdominal sound-field alterations. The thesis outline is as follows. The main objective of the thesis, which is the technological support of medical research, is presented in the first chapter. A quick problem definition is initially ...

eXtended Reality (XR) technology, also called Mixed Reality (MR), is in constant development and improvement in terms of hardware and software to offer relevant experiences to users. One of the advances in XR has been the introduction of real visual information in the virtual environment, offering a more natural interaction with the scene and a greater acceptance of technology. Another advance has been achieved with the representation of the scene through a video that covers the entire environment, called 360-degree or omnidirectional video. These videos are acquired by cameras with omnidirectional lenses that cover the 360-degrees of the scene and are generally viewed by users through a head-tracked Head Mounted Display (HMD). Users only visualize a subset of the 360-degree scene, called viewport, which changes with the variations of the viewing direction of the users, determined by the movements of ...

In the world of Information and communications technology (ICT), strategies for innovation and development are increasingly focusing on applications that require spatial representation and real-time interaction with and within 3D-media environments. One of the major challenges that such applications have to address is user-centricity, reflecting e.g. on developing complexity-hiding services so that people can personalize their own delivery of services. In these terms, multimodal interfaces represent a key factor for enabling an inclusive use of new technologies by everyone. In order to achieve this, multimodal realistic models that describe our environment are needed, and in particular models that accurately describe the acoustics of the environment and communication through the auditory modality are required. Examples of currently active research directions and application areas include 3DTV and future internet, 3D visual-sound scene coding, transmission and reconstruction and teleconferencing systems, to name but ...

This thesis is related to the field of Sound Source Separation (SSS). It addresses the development and evaluation of these techniques for their application in the resynthesis of high-realism sound scenes by means of Wave Field Synthesis (WFS). Because the vast majority of audio recordings are preserved in two-channel stereo format, special up-converters are required to use advanced spatial audio reproduction formats, such as WFS. This is due to the fact that WFS needs the original source signals to be available, in order to accurately synthesize the acoustic field inside an extended listening area. Thus, an object-based mixing is required. Source separation problems in digital signal processing are those in which several signals have been mixed together and the objective is to find out what the original signals were. Therefore, SSS algorithms can be applied to existing two-channel mixtures to ...

In the last decades, air traffic spread more and more in the world, connecting more and more places. At the same time, the need to manage all the flights correctly and securely increased. Air traffic authorities imposed and updated several standards for the air traffic management (ATM) system, keeping in pace with the growing traffic flow. To achieve this, special voice communication systems (VCS) were developed. They ensure the communication between the pilots and the operators from the ground control centers. When a communication is initiated between the aircraft’s pilot and the ground air traffic control operator, various systems are used. The pilot speaks through the aircraft’s radio station and the signal is received by several ground radio stations. Then, the signal from each ground radio station arrives on different paths to the control center. Here one of the received ...

This Thesis is focused on dealing with the variability factors in biometric recognition and applications of biometrics at a distance. In particular, this PhD Thesis explores the problem of variability factors assessment and how to deal with them by the incorporation of soft biometrics information in order to improve person recognition systems working at a distance. The proposed methods supported by experimental results show the benefits of adapting the system considering the variability of the sample at hand. Although being relatively young compared to other mature and long-used security technologies, biometrics have emerged in the last decade as a pushing alternative for applications where automatic recognition of people is needed. Certainly, biometrics are very attractive and useful for video surveillance systems at a distance, widely distributed in our lifes, and for the final user: forget about PINs and passwords, you ...

This thesis contributes to motion characterization through inertial and physiological signals captured by wearable devices and analyzed using signal processing and deep learning techniques. This research leverages the possibilities of motion analysis for three main applications: to know what physical activity a person is performing (Human Activity Recognition), to identify who is performing that motion (user identification) or know how the movement is being performed (motor anomaly detection). Most previous research has addressed human motion modeling using invasive sensors in contact with the user or intrusive sensors that modify the user’s behavior while performing an action (cameras or microphones). In this sense, wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches can collect motion signals from users during their daily lives in a less invasive or intrusive way. Recently, there has been an exponential increase in research focused on inertial-signal processing to ...

The aim of immersive spatial audio technologies, as used, e.g., in virtual and augmented reality applications, is to provide the user with an immersive and plausible listening experience. The overall goal is to render the presented three-dimensional sound scenes realistically in a perceptual sense, either over headphones or using a multi-channel loudspeaker setup. Besides a good sound quality, it is essential to consider relevant spatial attributes of the presented sound scenes. One important aspect is the localization of individual sound sources. Additionally, other perceptual aspects of the presented sound scenes need to be considered, including the perceived spatial extent (i.e., “size”) of a sound source and the perceptual impression of the surrounding environment. From a perceptual point of view, the degree of correlation between the sounds received by the ears is an important factor influencing both the perceived spatial extent ...

An analysis of the ergonomic quality of the current standards for the visual display quality leads to a number of recommendations for the development of new international standards: - Separation for different types of users, esp. display designers, purchasers, and end users, -Independence of display technology to allow comparison, -Modular construction with several quality grades to allow benchmarking for different types of applications, -A test method for the end user standard that can be performed at the place of work, to take into account the effects of wear and drift of components and to be able to correct suboptimal configurations. The separate parameters that exert influence on the image quality of a broad category of images in the context of use, and their mutual coherence within the cycle of evaluation and adaptation of image quality are presented in the "Image ...

The central topic of this thesis is Reverberation. Reverberation is used as a global term to describe a series of physical and perceptual phenomena that occur in enclosed environments and relate to the acoustical interaction between a sound source and the enclosure. This work focuses on the effects of reverberation that are likely to occur within common listening environments, such as car cabins and ordinary residential listening rooms. In the first study, a number of acoustical fields was captured in a physically modified car cabin and evaluated by expert listeners in a laboratory, using a spatial reproduction system. In the second study, nine acoustical conditions from four ordinary listening rooms were perceptually evaluated by experienced listeners. The results indicated the importance of decay times in these types of enclosures, even in these theoretically short and nondominant quantities. It was shown ...

This thesis concentrates on a major problem within audio signal processing, the separation of source signals from musical mixtures when only a single mixture channel is available. Source separation is the process by which signals that correspond to distinct sources are identified in a signal mixture and extracted from it. Producing multiple entities from a single one is an extremely underdetermined task, so additional prior information can assist in setting appropriate constraints on the solution set. The approach proposed uses prior information such that: (1) it can potentially be applied successfully to a large variety of musical mixtures, and (2) it requires minimal user intervention and no prior learning/training procedures (i.e., it is an unsupervised process). This system can be useful for applications such as remixing, creative effects, restoration and for archiving musical material for internet delivery, amongst others. Here, ...

Personal Sound Zones (PSZ) systems deliver different sounds to a number of listeners sharing an acoustic space through the use of loudspeakers together with signal processing techniques. These systems have attracted a lot of attention in recent years because of the wide range of applications that would benefit from the generation of individual listening zones, e.g., domestic or automotive audio applications. A key aspect of PSZ systems, at least for low and mid frequencies, is the optimization of the filters used to process the sound signals. Different algorithms have been proposed in the literature for computing those filters, each exhibiting some advantages and disadvantages. In this work, the state-of-the-art algorithms for PSZ systems are reviewed, and their performance in a reverberant environment is evaluated. Aspects such as the acoustic isolation between zones, the reproduction error, the energy of the filters, ...