TY - GEN
T1 - Perceptually-Motivated Spatial Audio Codec for Higher-Order Ambisonics Compression
AU - Hold, Christoph
AU - McCormack, Leo
AU - Politis, Archontis
AU - Pulkki, Ville
PY - 2024/3/18
Y1 - 2024/3/18
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
U2 - 10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10447577
DO - 10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10447577
M3 - Conference article in proceedings
T3 - Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Avcoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
BT - ICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
PB - IEEE
T2 - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
Y2 - 14 April 2024 through 19 April 2024
ER -