Low-Rate High-Quality Parametric Audio Coder based on Sinusoidal plus Noise Representations

Abstract

This paper presents a parametric audio compression scheme intended for scalable audio coding applications, and is particularly well suited for operation at low rates, in the vicinity of 5 to 32 Kbps. The model consists of two complementary components: Sines plus Noise (SN). The principal component of the system is an. overlap-add analysis-by-synthesis sinusoidal model based on conjugate matching pursuits. Perceptual information about human hearing is explicitly included into the model by psychoacoustically weighting the pursuit metric. Once analyzed, SN parameters are efficiently quantized and coded. Our informal listening tests demonstrated that our coder gave competitive performance to the-state-of-the- art HelixTM Producer Plus 9 from Real Networks®, and on the average our coder Offered a 20 percent lower bitrate for the some audio quality. The audio coder gives a much wider range of scalability than previous work of sinusoidal coders as well as existing commercial audio coders. Moreover, the audio coder a gracefully degrades in quality from hi-fidelity to a reasonable quality at a very low bitrate, 5 Kbps. The most obvious application for the SN coder is in scalable, high fidelity audio coding and signal modification.