Clean Audio for TV broadcast: an object-based approach for hearing impaired viewers

As the percentage of the population with hearing loss increases, broadcasters are receiving more complaints about the difficulty in understanding dialog in the presence of background sound and music. This article explores these issues, reviews previously proposed solutions, and presents an object-based approach that can be implemented within MPEG-H to give listeners control of their audio mix. An object-based approach to clean audio, combined with methods to isolate sounds that are important to the narrative and meaning of a broadcast has the potential to enable users to have complete control of the relative levels of all aspects of audio from TV broadcast. This approach was demonstrated at the University of Salford campus in 2013