Principles and analysis of the squeezing approach to low bit rate spatial audio coding

Authors

B. Cheng, University of WollongongFollow
C. H. Ritz, University of WollongongFollow
I. Burnett, University of WollongongFollow

RIS ID

22914

Publication Details

This paper was originally published as: Cheng, B., Ritz, C. & Burnett, I., Principles and analysis of the squeezing approach to low bit rate spatial audio coding, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 2007 (ICASSP 2007), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 15-20 April 2007, 1, I-13-I-16. Copyright 2007 IEEE.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel solution to multichannel spatial audio coding: spatial squeezing surround audio coding (S³AC). The S³AC scheme analyses a multichannel audio signal and downmixes it into a stereo signal pair containing both the monophonic properties of audio sources and their localization information; this avoids the need for side information. The approach uses time-frequency analysis of a spatial audio scene and exploits virtual sources and amplitude panning techniques to 'squeeze' 360deg of a horizontal soundfield to a 60deg stereo signal pair. In comparison with other spatial audio coding techniques, S³AC significantly advances in-band encoding of the localization information in the original sound scene and achieves accurate recoverability of dynamic localized sources.