EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2003 (2003), Issue 10, Pages 980-992
doi:10.1155/S1110865703304044

Progressive Syntax-Rich Coding of Multichannel Audio Sources

Dai Yang, Hongmei Ai, Chris Kyriakakis, and C.-C. Jay Kuo

 Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089-2564, CA, USA
Received 6 May 2002; Revised 5 March 2003

Abstract

Being able to transmit the audio bitstream progressively is a highly desirable property for network transmission. MPEG-4 version 2 audio supports fine grain bit rate scalability in the generic audio coder (GAC). It has a bit-sliced arithmetic coding (BSAC) tool, which provides scalability in the step of 1 Kbps per audio channel. There are also several other scalable audio coding methods, which have been proposed in recent years. However, these scalable audio tools are only available for mono and stereo audio material. Little work has been done on progressive coding of multichannel audio sources. MPEG advanced audio coding (AAC) is one of the most distinguished multichannel digital audio compression systems. Based on AAC, we develop in this work a progressive syntax-rich multichannel audio codec (PSMAC). It not only supports fine grain bit rate scalability for the multichannel audio bitstream but also provides several other desirable functionalities. A formal subjective listening test shows that the proposed algorithm achieves an excellent performance at several different bit rates when compared with MPEG AAC.