HUMAN PERCEPTION AND SIGNAL PROCESSING - THE MISSING LINK?


Signal processing is present and has a significant role in the daily life of almost all human beings – from ordinary domestic appliances to echo cancellation in mobile phones, compression of audio and video signals, search engines for music and video and music databases and so on and so on….and constantly increasing processing power makes for an almost endless list of possible applications. But, and this is a significant “but”, almost everybody has experienced a situation where all the possibilities for control/adjustment/calibration is of no benefit to the user either because it is impossible for the user to understand what is going on or because the “processing” does not benefit the specific intentions or context of the user. The missing link is often a basic knowledge of the relationship between what is being controlled or processed and the human perception of the introduced changes. The study of the relationship between changes in the physical world and the corresponding changes in human perception is the science called “psychophysics” or sensory science in a broader context. The purpose of this talk is to highlight a number of cases from Bang & Olufsen’s audio/video portfolio where sensory science has been applied and the results implemented in products such that, for example, the perceived video quality remains constant independent of changes in the physical environment surrounding the product or in the signal entering the product. This talk will also include a discussion of the experimental paradigms that make it possible to quantify perceived impressions into objective data that can be used to establish valid psychophysical relationships.


Head of Research, Dr. Søren Bech
Bang & Olufsen
Struer, Denmark