Robust Parametric Audio Coding Using Multiple Description Coding

• Published in: IEEE signal processing letters Vol. 16; no. 12; pp. 1083 - 1086
• Main Authors: Jensen, J.R., Christensen, M.G., Jensen, M.H., Jensen, S.H., Larsen, T.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.12.2009; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Amplitudes; Audio coding; Bit rate; Coding; Councils; Counters; Distortion; Distortion measurement; Frequency; Masking threshold; Multiple description coding; perceptual audio coding; Phases; pre- and post-filtering; Quantization; Robustness; Signal processing; sinusoidal parametric coding; Sound; spherical quantization; Testing; Transform coding
• ISSN: 1070-9908; 1558-2361
• DOI: 10.1109/LSP.2009.2030852

We propose a new multiple description spherical quantization with repetitively coded amplitudes (MDSQRA) scheme suited for quantization of sinusoidal parameters. The quantization scheme is constituted by a set of spherical quantizers inspired by the multiple description spherical trellis-coded quantization (MDSTCQ) scheme. In this scheme, we apply repetitive coding on the amplitudes, while multiple description coding are applied on the phases and frequencies. Thereby, MDSQRA becomes directly implementable, as opposed to MDSTCQ, since the phase and frequency quantizers depend on the amplitudes which have dissimilar descriptions in MDSTCQ. Furthermore, we implement MDSQRA into a perceptual matching pursuit based sinusoidal audio coder. Finally, we evaluate MDSQRA through perceptual distortion measurements and MUSHRA listening tests. The tests show that MDSQRA outperforms MDSTCQ with respect to a expected perceptual distortion measure. The same results are obtained through the MUSHRA tests performed on sound clips coded using MDSQRA and MDSTCQ.