Age demographics have led to an increase in the proportion of the population suffering
from some form of hearing loss. The introduction of object-based audio to television
broadcast has the potential to improve the viewing experience for millions of hearing
impaired people. Personalization of object-based audio can assist in overcoming
difficulties in understanding speech and understanding the narrative of broadcast
media. The research presented here documents a Multi-Dimensional Audio (MDA)
implementation of object-based clean audio to present independent object streams
based on object category elicitation. Evaluations were carried out with hearing
impaired people and participants were able to personalize audio levels independently
for four object-categories using an on-screen menu: speech, music, background
effects and foreground effects related to on-screen events. Results show considerable
preference variation across subjects but indicate that expanding object-category
personalization beyond a binary speech/non-speech categorization can substantially
improve the viewing experience for some hearing impaired people
