Progressive Syntax-Rich Coding of Multichannel Audio Sources
- PDF / 875,171 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 600 x 792 pts Page_size
- 63 Downloads / 224 Views
Progressive Syntax-Rich Coding of Multichannel Audio Sources Dai Yang Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: [email protected]
Hongmei Ai Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: [email protected]
Chris Kyriakakis Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: [email protected]
C.-C. Jay Kuo Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: [email protected] Received 6 May 2002 and in revised form 5 March 2003 Being able to transmit the audio bitstream progressively is a highly desirable property for network transmission. MPEG-4 version 2 audio supports fine grain bit rate scalability in the generic audio coder (GAC). It has a bit-sliced arithmetic coding (BSAC) tool, which provides scalability in the step of 1 Kbps per audio channel. There are also several other scalable audio coding methods, which have been proposed in recent years. However, these scalable audio tools are only available for mono and stereo audio material. Little work has been done on progressive coding of multichannel audio sources. MPEG advanced audio coding (AAC) is one of the most distinguished multichannel digital audio compression systems. Based on AAC, we develop in this work a progressive syntax-rich multichannel audio codec (PSMAC). It not only supports fine grain bit rate scalability for the multichannel audio bitstream but also provides several other desirable functionalities. A formal subjective listening test shows that the proposed algorithm achieves an excellent performance at several different bit rates when compared with MPEG AAC. Keywords and phrases: multichannel audio, progressive coding, Karhunen-Lo´eve transform, successive quantization, PSMAC.
1.
INTRODUCTION
Multichannel audio technologies have become much more mature these days, partially pushed by the need of the film industry and home entertainment systems. Starting from the monophonic technology, new systems, such as stereophonic, quadraphonic, 5.1 channels, and 10.2 channels, are penetrating into the market very quickly. Compared with the mono or stereo sound, multichannel audio provides end users a more compelling experience and becomes more appealing to music producers. As a result, an efficient coding scheme for multichannel audio storage and transmission is in great demand. Among several existing multichannel audio com-
pression algorithms, Dolby AC-3 and MPEG advanced audio coding (AAC) [1, 2, 3, 4] are two most prevalent perceptual digital audio coding systems. Both of them can provide perceptually indistinguishable audio quality at the bit rate of 64 Kbps/ch. In spite of their success, they can only provide bitstreams with a fixed bit rate, which
Data Loading...
