Perceptually-Motivated Spatial Audio Codec for Higher-Order Ambisonics Compression

Christoph Hold, Leo McCormack, Archontis Politis, Ville Pulkki

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference article in proceedingsScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

Scene-based spatial audio formats, such as Ambisonics, are playback system agnostic and may therefore be favoured for delivering immersive audio experiences to a wide range of (potentially unknown) devices. The number of channels required to deliver high spatial resolution Ambisonic audio, however, can be prohibitive for low-bandwidth applications. Therefore, this paper proposes a compression codec, which is based upon the parametric higher-order Directional Audio Coding (HO-DirAC) model. The encoder downmixes the higher-order Ambisonic (HOA) input audio into a reduced number of signals, which are accompanied by perceptually-motivated scene parameters. The downmixed audio is coded using a perceptual audio coder, whereas the parameters are grouped into perceptual bands, quantized, and downsampled. On the decoder side, low Ambisonic orders are fully recovered. Not fully recoverable HOA components are synthesized according to the parameters. The results of a listening test indicate that the proposed parametric spatial audio codec can improve the adopted perceptual audio coder, especially at low to medium-high bitrates, when applied to fifth-order HOA signals.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
PublisherIEEE
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)979-8-3503-4485-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 18 Mar 2024
MoE publication typeA4 Conference publication
EventIEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Seoul, Korea, Republic of, Seoul, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 14 Apr 202419 Apr 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Avcoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
ISSN (Electronic)2379-190X

Conference

ConferenceIEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
Abbreviated titleICASSP
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CitySeoul
Period14/04/202419/04/2024

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