Parametric Spatial Audio Techniques in Teleconferencing and Remote Presence

This chapter presents the applications of time‐frequency parametric spatial audio techniques in the areas of teleconferencing and remote presence. It focuses on crowded soundscapes, such as those encountered at athletic events, where the objective is to reproduce the fans' reactions for the remote participant. The chapter briefly presents the state of the art in parametric spatial audio techniques, emphasizing those methods that are based on uniform microphone arrays as the capturing device. Directional audio coding represents an important paradigm in the family of parametric approaches, providing an efficient description of spatial sound in terms of one or more audio signals and parametric side information, namely the DOA and the diffuseness of the sound. Typically, capturing large sports events is accomplished with several microphones placed around the pitch or inside the crowd, so that each microphone focuses on a particular segment of the event.