Dialogue Enhancement answers broadcasters’ challenge to deliver balanced dialog and ambient sound audio for TV and radio
LAS VEGAS – April 18, 2012 (Booth # SU6212) – Fraunhofer IIS, the world’s renowned source for audio and multimedia technologies, announces today that its Dialogue Enhancement technology has been selected by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) for its 2012 NAB Technology Innovation Award.
The Dialogue Enhancement technology is the first of its kind, allowing radio listeners and TV viewers to control audio volumes of dialogues and to tailor the sounds to their liking. Fraunhofer will be demonstrating this technology at its NAB booth, using clips from an experiment it conducted with the BBC during the 2011 Wimbledon lawn tennis tournament. The demonstration provides visitors with a first hand experience, allowing them to control the relative volume of commentary and court sounds.
The 2012 NAB Innovation Awards, open to all organizations exhibiting a non-commercialized service or product at this year’s show, was started in 2009 to recognize advanced technology exhibits and demonstrations of significant merit to the NAB Show.
“Dialogue Enhancement nicely complements our HE-AAC audio codec which is already widely used in broadcast and streaming,” said Harald Popp, head of the Multimedia Realtime Systems department at Fraunhofer IIS. “Whereas HE-AAC enables the efficient transmission of high-quality audio, Dialogue Enhancement dramatically increases the speech intelligibility which is one of the most demanded features by TV and radio audiences.”
Dialogue Enhancement and the Wimbledon experiment was shown as a technology preview at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam. TVB Europe selected it for the “Best of IBC2011” Editor’s Award in the category “Audio”, published in TVB Europe’s October issue.
For more information on Fraunhofer’s Dialogue Enhancement Technology, please visit http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm.
About Fraunhofer
The Fraunhofer IIS Audio and Multimedia division, based in Erlangen, Germany, has been working in compressed audio technology for more than 20 years and remains a leading innovator of technologies for cutting-edge multimedia systems. Fraunhofer IIS is universally credited with the development of mp3 and co-development of AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) as well as technologies for the media world of tomorrow, including MPEG Surround and the Fraunhofer Audio Communication Engine.
Through the course of more than two decades, Fraunhofer IIS has licensed its audio codec software and application-specific customizations to at least 1,000 companies. Fraunhofer estimates that it has enabled more than 5 billion commercial products worldwide using its mp3, AAC and other media technologies.
The Fraunhofer IIS organization is part of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, based in Munich, Germany. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is Europe’s largest applied research organization and is partly funded by the German government. With 20,000 employees worldwide, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is composed of 60 Institutes conducting research in a broad range of research areas. For more information, contact Matthias Rose, matthias.rose@iis.fraunhofer.de, or visit www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm.
