Parametric stereo extension of ITU-T G.722 based on a new downmixing scheme

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel, frequency-domain stereo to mono downmixing, which preserves the energy of spectral components and avoids setting the left or right channel as a phase reference. Based on this downmixing technique, a parametric stereo analysis-synthesis model is described in which subband stereo parameters consist of interchannel level differences and phase differences between the mono signal and one of the stereo channels (left or right). This model is applied to the stereo extension of ITU-T G.722 at 56+8 and 64+16 kbit/s with a frame length of 5 ms. AB test results are provided to assess the quality of the proposed downmixing technique. In addition, the quality of the proposed G.722-based stereo coder is compared against reference coders (G.722.1 at 24 and 32 kbit/s dual mono and G.722 at 64 kbit/s dual mono) for clean speech, noisy speech and music.