An Efficient Representation Method for ICLD with Robustness to Spectral Distortion

Abstract

The inter-channel level difference (ICLD) is a cue parameter to estimate spectral information in binaural cue coding that has been recently in the spotlight as a multichannel audio signal compression technique. Even though the ICLD is an essential parameter, it is generally distorted by quantization. In this paper, a new modified ICLD representation method to minimize the quantization distortion is proposed by adopting a flexible determination of the reference channel and the unidirectional quantization scheme. Our experimental result confirms that the proposed method improves the multichannel audio output quality even with the reduced bit-rate.