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Audio Coding
Introduction
S. R. M. Prasanna
Dept of ECE,
IIT Guwahati,
prasanna@iitg.ernet.in

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Goal of Audio Coding

Terms Coding and Compression are used
interchangeably.
Goal of audio coding is to develop methods for compact
digital representation of audio signals.
Efficient transmission or storage.
Minimum number of bits with transparent perceptual
quality.

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First Generation Audio Coders

Digital representation of audio signals.
Compact Disc (CD) is the digital storage medium.
Sampling frequency is 44.1 kHz and Bit rate 16
bits/sample
20 kHz audio spectrum + 2.05 guard band = 22.05
kHz
Sampling freq = 22.05 2 = 44.1kHz .
Data rate:
44100 16 = 705.6 kb/s for mono
705.6 2 = 1.41 Mb/s for stereo

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For network and wireless multimedia digital audio.

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Second Generation Audio Coders

Bandwidth is the severe constraint.
At the same time, end-users need CD quality.
Conflicting requirements.
Goal is to reduce data rate without compromising on
the perceptual quality.
Led to several audio compression algorithms.
Exploit both perceptual irrelevancies and statistical
redundancies.

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Lossless audio

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Third Generation Audio Coders

Spatial audio
Real-time source localization
Head related transfer function (HRTF)
Immersive audio

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Audio Coding Methods

PCM (1.41 Mb/s).
DPCM (0.75 x PCM data rate).
ADPCM (0.5 x PCM data rate).
Not much data rate reduction.
Need for high compression methods driven by potential
applications.
New approaches for audio coding based on the
principles of psychoacoustics.

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Psychoacoustics
Characterizing human auditory perception.
Time-frequency analysis capabilities of the inner ear.
Perceptually irrelevant audio signal information.
Contributions from psychoacoustics:
Perceptual entropy
Auditory filter bank
Perceptual entropy deals with estimate of the
fundamental limit of transparent audio signal
compression.
Auditory filter bank based on the time-frequency
analysis capabilities of the inner ear.

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MPEG-1 Audio (1992).

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Some Audio Coding Standards

MPEG-2 Audio (1996).
MPEG-4 Audio v1 (1999).
MPEG-4 Audio v2 (2000)

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Block Diagram of Generic Audio Coder

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Segment input signals into quasi-stationary frames of

2-50 ms.

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Principle of Generic Audio Coder

Time-frequency analysis estimates the temporal and

spectral components of each frame.
TFA approach employed is based on human auditory
system.
Objective is to extract a set of time-frequency
parameters that are robust to quantization according to
a perceptual distortion metric.
Perceptual distortion control is achieved by a
psychoacoustic signal analysis section that estimates
signal masking power based on psychoacoustic
principles.

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Psychoacoustic model delivers masking thresholds that

quantify the maximum amount of distortion at each
point in the time-frequency plane such that quantization
of the time-frequency parameters does not introduce
audible artifacts.

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Principle of AC (contd.)

Psychoacoustic model allows the quantization section

to exploit perceptual irrelevancies.
Final redundancy removal based on the perceptual
entropy coding scheme.

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Audio Coder Attributes

Audio reproduction quality.
Operating bit rates.
Computational complexity.
Codec delay.
Channel error robustness.
High quality audio at low bit rates (< 32 kb/s) with an
acceptable algorithm delay (5-20 ms), and with low
computational complexity (1-10 MIPS).

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Based on the signal model or analysis-synthesis

technique.

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Types of Audio Coders

LP
Transform
Subband
Sinusoidal

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AC-Expt.1
Effect of Sampling Frequency and Bit Resolution
Objective is to analyze the effect of sampling frequency
and bit resolution on the perceptual quality of audio.
Take a CD quality music signal of 1 sec, sampled at
44.1 kHz with 16 bits/sample and perform the following.
Change its sampling frequency to 16, 8 and 4 kHz.
Keep bit resolution constant at 16 bits/sample.
Consider about 50 ms segment in a high energy
region.
Plot the time domain and DFT spectra for all the
four cases.
Comment on the effect of different sampling
frequency.
Comment also on the perceptual quality of the
audio.

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AC-Expt.1
Effect of Sampling Frequency and Bit Resolution
Change its bit resolution to 8, 4 and 1 bits/sample.
Keep sampling frequency constant at 44.1 kHz.
Consider the same 50 ms segment in a high energy
region.
Plot the time domain and DFT spectra for all the
four cases.
Comment on the effect of different bit resolutions.
Comment also on the perceptual quality of the
audio.

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