Object oriented audio coding

Details Object oriented audio coding Object oriented audio coding

1998-05-14

2000-08-22

Knepper, David D.

Data processing: speech signal processing, linguistics, language

Speech signal processing

For storage or transmission

704205, 704220, 704219, 704229, 704278, G10L 1100, G10L 2100

Patent

active

061086266

DESCRIPTION:

BRIEF SUMMARY
The present invention relates to systems for processing and transmitting digitally coded audio signals and more particularly it concerns a method of and an apparatus for coding, manipulating and decoding audio signals (i.e. signals with bandwidth 20 Hz up to 20 kHz), independently of the specific signal content (e.g. speech signal, music signal, noise, etc.).
Those signals will also be referred to as generic audio signals and the coding-decoding of such signals will also be referred to as generic coding and decoding.
Preferably, but not exclusively, the method and apparatus find application in coding, manipulating and decoding the audio component of audio-visual (multimedia) signals.
It is known that audio-visual applications are becoming an area of convergence of telecommunications, computer and TV/film industries. Audio-visual coding methods are therefore being studied that take into account new expectations and requirements arising from the convergence. In particular the new methods must allow interactivity, high compression and/or universal accessibility; moreover, to take advantage of the rapidly evolving technologies, the methods must provide for a high degree of flexibility and extensibility.
Content-based interactivity involves the ability for the user to interact with and manipulate meaningful objects in an audio-visual scene. Currently, interaction is limited to computer graphics, i.e. to synthetic contents. New audio-visual applications are on the contrary expected to demand interaction also with natural or hybrid natural/synthetic audio-visual objects. High compression is required for efficient use of storage facilities and transmission bandwidth, and improvements in compression efficiency are important to enable high quality, low bit rate applications. Universal accessibility means that audio-visual data should be available over a wide range of storage and transmission media: in view of the rapid growth of mobile communications, access to the applications should be available via wireless networks and this implies a need for useful operation in error prone environments and at low bit rates.
As far as processing of the audio component is concerned, the requirement of flexibility includes the facility to vary the main characteristics of an encoder such as bit rate, delay, quality, bandwidth, channel error robustness, etc., by changing only the coding parameters within a permitted set of values. Such flexibility could allow use of a generic coder-decoder in a large variety of applications with different requirements. The availability of a generic coder-decoder would ease, in future digital systems, the exchange of audio data generated from different sources, simplifying network interfaces and reducing quality loss associated to transcoding among different standards. This will gain significant importance in view of the increased exchange of audio data between different (mobile or fixed) networks which are part of the future Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS). The generic coder should also accommodate the possibility to modify the coder-decoder parameters, in order the user can suite the service to his specific needs or equipment and the service provider can optimise the service in dependence of the system conditions. Additionally the coder should support the application of a configuration phase prior to the exchange of audio data. In such a phase the codes is configured depending on the service requirements determined by the user and the system.
No generic coder of that kind is known in the art. Some coding techniques, generally known as "embedded coding", admit bit rate reduction without changing the encoder characteristics. In other words, the encoder operates according to a fixed algorithm and the coded signal is so organised that part of the information can be lost or suppressed along the transmission path, and yet the decoder is still able to decode the signal, even if with a certain degradation in the quality, provided that at least an essential information is received. Examples

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CCITT, Geneva, 1990, General Aspects of Digital Transmission Systems: Terminal Equipments.

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