Challenges and Opportunities for Designing Tactile Codecs from Audio Codecs

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Abstract

Haptic communications allows physical interaction over long distances and greatly complements conventional means of communications, such as audio and video. However, whilst standardized codecs for video and audio are well established, there is a lack of standardized codecs for haptics. This causes vendor lock-in and thereby greatly limits scalability, increases cost and prevents advanced usage scenarios with multi-sensors/actuators and multi-users. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new approach for understanding and encoding tactile signals, i.e. the sense of touch, among haptic interactions. Inspired by various audio codecs, we develop a similar methodology for tactile codecs. Notably, we demonstrate that tactile and audio signals are similar in both time and frequency domains, thereby allowing audio coding techniques to be adapted to tactile codecs with appropriate adjustments. We also present the differences between audio and tactile signals that should be considered in future designs. Moreover, in order to evaluate the performance of a tactile codec, we propose a potential direction of designing an objective quality metric which complements haptic mean opinion scores (h-MOS). This, we hope, will open the door for designing and assessing tactile codecs.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2017 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC)
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781538638736
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Jul 2017
Event2017 European Conference on Networks and Communications, EuCNC 2017 - Oulu, Finland
Duration: 12 Jun 201715 Jun 2017

Conference

Conference2017 European Conference on Networks and Communications, EuCNC 2017
Country/TerritoryFinland
CityOulu
Period12/06/201715/06/2017

Keywords

  • audio codec
  • Haptic
  • haptic mean opinion score
  • objective quality metrics
  • tactile codec
  • texture

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