Abstract
Rendering spatial sound scenes via audio objects has become popular in recent years, since it can provide more flexibility for different auditory scenarios, such as 3D movies, spatial audio communication and virtual classrooms. To facilitate high-quality bitrate-efficient distribution for spatial audio objects, an encoding scheme based on intra-object sparsity (approximate k-sparsity of the audio object itself) is proposed in this paper. The statistical analysis is presented to validate the notion that the audio object has a stronger sparseness in the Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT) domain than in the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) domain. By exploiting intra-object sparsity in the MDCT domain, multiple simultaneously occurring audio objects are compressed into a mono downmix signal with side information. To ensure a balanced perception quality of audio objects, a Psychoacoustic-based time-frequency instants sorting algorithm and an energy equalized Number of Preserved Time-Frequency Bins (NPTF) allocation strategy are proposed, which are employed in the underlying compression framework. The downmix signal can be further encoded via Scalar Quantized Vector Huffman Coding (SQVH) technique at a desirable bitrate, and the side information is transmitted in a lossless manner. Both objective and subjective evaluations show that the proposed encoding scheme outperforms the Sparsity Analysis (SPA) approach and Spatial Audio Object Coding (SAOC) in cases where eight objects were jointly encoded.
Highlights
With the development of multimedia video/audio signal processing, multi-channel 3D audio has been widely employed for applications, such as cinemas and home theatre systems, since it can provide excellent spatial realism of the original sound field, as compared to the traditional mono/stereo audio format.There are multiple formats for rendering 3D audio, which contain channel-based, object-based and Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA)-based audio formats
The results show that audio objects have sparsity-promoting property in the Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT) domain, which means that a greater data compression ratio can be achieved
Scores for proposed achieve over indicating subjective quality compared to the Reference, which proves that the subjective quality compared to the Reference, which proves that the better perceptual indicating ’Excellent’ subjective quality compared to the Hidden Reference, which proves that the bettercan perceptual quality can be be attained attained compared to the the reference reference approach
Summary
With the development of multimedia video/audio signal processing, multi-channel 3D audio has been widely employed for applications, such as cinemas and home theatre systems, since it can provide excellent spatial realism of the original sound field, as compared to the traditional mono/stereo audio format. The decoded signals can be achieved by inverse mapping the 60◦ stereo soundfield into 360◦ Such channel-based audio format has its limitation on flexibility, i.e., each channel is designated to feed a loudspeaker in a known prescribed position and cannot be adjusted for different reproduction needs by the users. A Psychoacoustic-based Analysis-By-Synthesis (PABS) method [16,17] was proposed for encoding multiple speech objects, which could compress four simultaneously occurring speech sources in two downmix signals relied on inter-object sparsity [18]. Based on intra-object sparsity, we propose a novel encoding scheme for multiple audio objects to further optimize our previous proposed approach and minimize the quality loss caused by compression. By exploiting intra-object sparsity in the Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT) domain, multiple simultaneously occurring audio objects are compressed into a mono downmix signal with side information. Appendix A investigates the sparsity of audio objects in the STFT and MDCT domain, respectively
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