HAPG-SAQAM: Human Auditory Perception Guided Spatial Audio Quality Assessment Metric

Abstract

Spatial audio quality evaluation is essential for applications like virtual and augmented reality, where accurate sound reproduction enhances user immersion. While subjective listening tests are the gold standard, they are costly and time-consuming. To address this, we propose HAPG-SAQAM, an objective metric for assessing timbre quality, spatial quality, and overall quality of binaural audio, guided by human auditory perception. Our contributions include: (1) the Multi-scale Auditory Guided Feature Extraction (MAGFE) module, incorporating gammatone frequency cepstral coefficients for better alignment with human perception; (2) Perceptual Weighted Loss (PWL), optimizing the weighting of timbre quality (TQ) and spatial quality (SQ) loss based on subjective test data; and (3) data augmentation techniques to enhance robustness by amplifying perceptual distortions. Experimental results show HAPG-SAQAM improves correlation with subjective scores by 10%, with ablation studies confirming the contributions of its components to enhanced spatial and overall audio quality.