Perceptual Importance of Karhunen-Lòeve Transformed Multichannel Audio Signals

The Karhunen-Lòeve Transform (KLT) can be used to reduce the interchannel redundancy of multichannel audio signals. For this paper, the perceptual importance of Karhunen-Lòeve transformed multichannel audio signals was systematically studied using two experiments. The first experiment investigated the perceptual effects caused by removing some KLT eigenchannels. The results showed that some eigenchannels are not perceptually important and consequently can be discarded with minimal degradation of basic audio quality. The second experiment involved further investigation on the perceptual effect of KLT processing on the audio quality of multichannel audio as a function of the nature of the multichannel audio and eigenvalue extraction methods of KLT processing. It was also attempted to establish the relationship between the order of perceptual importance and the order of statistical importance of KLT eigenchannels. 1 Lars Henning is now employed by Focusrite Audio Engineering Ltd, High Wycombe, HP12 3FX, UK. Henning, Jiao et al. Perceptual Importance of KLT AES 121st Convention, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2006 October 5–8 Page 2 of 29