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A New Perceptual Model for Audio Coding Based on Spectro-Temporal Masking

In psychoacoustics, considerable advances have been made recently in developing computational models that can predict the discriminability of two sounds taking into account spectro-temporal masking effects. These models operate as artificial observers by making predictions about the discriminability of arbitrary signals [e.g. Dau et al. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 99, Vol. 36(15), 1996]. Therefore, such models can be applied in the context of a perceptual audio coder. A drawback, however, is the computational complexity of such advanced models, especially because the model needs to evaluate each quantization option separately. In this contribution a model is introduced and evaluated that is a computationally lighter version of the Dau model but maintains its essential spectro-temporal masking predictions. Listening test results in a transform coder setting show that the proposed model outperforms a conventional purely spectral masking model and the original model proposed by Dau.

Authors: Kohlrausch, Armin; Koppens, Jeroen; Oomen, Werner; van de Par, Steven
Affiliations: Philips Research Europe;Philips Applied Technologies(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention:124 (May 2008) Paper Number:7336 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Low Bit-Rate Audio Coding

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