12 accepted papers
Directional Audio Coding (DirAC) is a proven method for parametrically representing a 3D audio scene in B-format and is capable of reproducing it on arbitrary loudspeaker layouts. Although such a method seems well suited for low bitrate Ambisonic transmission, little work has been done on the feasib…
The Ambisonics audio format represents a 3D sound field as a fixed set of audio channels, with a tradeoff between spatial detail and the required number of audio channels. Because the number of audio channels that must be coded increases quadratically with respect to Ambisonics order, high-quality c…
The transmission of stereo audio in voice calls helps to improve immersion and user experience. However stereo coding has primarily been studied for broadcast or streaming applications. To extend the capabilities of 3GPP EVS, a hybrid stereo coding scheme combining predictive and parametric coding i…
The recently standardized 3GPP codec for Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) includes a parametric mode for efficiently coding multiple audio objects at low bit rates. In this mode, parametric side information is obtained from both the object metadata and the input audio objects. The side info…
Frequency domain processing, and in particular the use of Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT), is the most widespread approach to audio coding. However, at low bitrates, audio quality, especially for speech, degrades drastically due to the lack of available bits to directly code the transform…
The quality of speech coded by transform coding is affected by various artefacts especially when bitrates to quantize the frequency components become too low. In order to mitigate these coding artefacts and enhance the quality of coded speech, a post-processor that relies on a-priori information tra…
In recent years, neural vocoders have surpassed classical speech generation approaches in naturalness and perceptual quality of the synthesized speech. Computationally heavy models like WaveNet and WaveGlow achieve best results, while lightweight GAN models, e.g. MelGAN and Parallel WaveGAN, remain…
The quality of speech codecs deteriorates at low bitrates due to high quantization noise. A post-filter is generally employed to enhance the quality of the coded speech. In this paper, a data-driven post-filter relying on masking in the time-frequency domain is proposed. A fully connected neural net…
Spectral envelope modelling is a central part of speech and audio codecs and is traditionally based on either vector quantization or scalar quantization followed by entropy coding. To bridge the coding performance of vector quantization with the low complexity of the scalar case, we propose an itera…
Discontinuous Transmission (DTX) is an efficient way to drastically reduce the transmission rate of a communication codec in the absence of voice input. In this mode, most frames that are determined to consist of background noise only are dropped from transmission and replaced by some Comfort Noise…
Speech coders operating in time domain can be extended with a frequency domain mode to improve encoding of music, even though this is challenging at low delay. In such a scenario, the short analysis window limits the benefit of the transform coder, while a delayless switch between the two coders con…
Several state-of-the-art switched audio codecs employ the closed-loop mode decision to select the best coding mode at every frame. The closed-loop mode selection is known to have good performance but also high complexity. The new approach we propose in this paper is a low-complexity version of the c…