Abstract
Being able to transmit the audio bitstream progressively is a highly desirable property for network transmission. MPEG- version audio supports fine grain bit rate scalability in the generic audio coder (GAC). It has a bit-sliced arithmetic coding (BSAC) tool, which provides scalability in the step of 1 Kbps per audio channel. There are also several other scalable audio coding methods, which have been proposed in recent years. However, these scalable audio tools are only available for mono and stereo audio material. Little work has been done on progressive coding of multichannel audio sources. MPEG advanced audio coding (AAC) is one of the most distinguished multichannel digital audio compression systems. Based on AAC, we develop in this work a progressive syntax-rich multichannel audio codec (PSMAC). It not only supports fine grain bit rate scalability for the multichannel audio bitstream but also provides several other desirable functionalities. A formal subjective listening test shows that the proposed algorithm achieves an excellent performance at several different bit rates when compared with MPEG AAC.
Highlights
Multichannel audio technologies have become much more mature these days, partially pushed by the need of the film industry and home entertainment systems
We demonstrate that our progressive syntax-rich multichannel audio codec (PSMAC) can provide better quality of single-channel audio when compared with MPEG-4 version 2 generic audio coder (GAC) at several different bit rates
It is worthwhile to mention that the coding blocks adopted from advanced audio coding (AAC) have not been modified to improve the performance of the proposed PSMAC for fair comparison
Summary
Multichannel audio technologies have become much more mature these days, partially pushed by the need of the film industry and home entertainment systems. Among several existing multichannel audio compression algorithms, Dolby AC-3 and MPEG advanced audio coding (AAC) [1, 2, 3, 4] are two most prevalent perceptual digital audio coding systems Both of them can provide perceptually indistinguishable audio quality at the bit rate of 64 Kbps/ch. MPEG-4 version 2 audio coding supports fine grain bit rate scalablility [5, 6, 7, 8, 9] in its generic audio coder (GAC) It has a bit-sliced arithmetic coding (BSAC) tool, which provides scalability in the step of 1 Kbps per audio channel for mono or stereo audio material. Experimental results show that, when compared with MPEG AAC, the decoded multichannel audio generated by the proposed PSMAC’s mask-to-noise-ratio (MNR) progressive mode has comparable quality at high bit rates, such as.
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