Directional audio coding (DirAC) provides an efficient description of spatial sound in terms of an audio downmix signal and parametric side information, namely the direction of arrival and diffuseness of sound. The sound scene can be reproduced based on this information with any audio reproduction system such as multichannel playback or binaural rendering. Input to the DirAC analysis are acoustic signals, e.g., captured by a microphone array. The accuracy of the DirAC parameter estimation can suffer from a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a high temporal variance of the input signals. To handle these problems, this contribution proposes signal adaptive parameter estimators which increase the estimation accuracy by considering the SNR and the stationarity interval of the input. Simulations show that the DirAC analysis is significantly improved.

Authors: Del Galdo, Giovanni; Kuech, Fabian; Prus, Magdalena; Thiergart, Oliver
Affiliation: Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, IIS, Erlangen, Germany
AES Conference: 40th International Conference: Spatial Audio: Sense the Sound of Space (October 2010)
Paper Number: 5-1
Publication Date: October 8, 2010
Subject: Spatial Audio: Signal Processing and Coding

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.