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- All Subjects: Signal Processing
- All Subjects: Unity Development
- Creators: Berisha, Visar
- Creators: Kosut, Oliver
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Lossy compression is a form of compression that slightly degrades a signal in ways that are ideally not detectable to the human ear. This is opposite to lossless compression, in which the sample is not degraded at all. While lossless compression may seem like the best option, lossy compression, which is used in most audio and video, reduces transmission time and results in much smaller file sizes. However, this compression can affect quality if it goes too far. The more compression there is on a waveform, the more degradation there is, and once a file is lossy compressed, this process is not reversible. This project will observe the degradation of an audio signal after the application of Singular Value Decomposition compression, a lossy compression that eliminates singular values from a signal’s matrix.
Spatial audio can be especially useful for directing human attention. However, delivering spatial audio through speakers, rather than headphones that deliver audio directly to the ears, produces the issue of crosstalk, where sounds from each of the two speakers reach the opposite ear, inhibiting the spatialized effect. A research team at Meteor Studio has developed an algorithm called Xblock that solves this issue using a crosstalk cancellation technique. This thesis project expands upon the existing Xblock IoT system by providing a way to test the accuracy of the directionality of sounds generated with spatial audio. More specifically, the objective is to determine whether the usage of Xblock with smart speakers can provide generalized audio localization, which refers to the ability to detect a general direction of where a sound might be coming from. This project also expands upon the existing Xblock technique to integrate voice commands, where users can verbalize the name of a lost item using the phrase, “Find [item]”, and the IoT system will use spatial audio to guide them to it.