TEMPORALQUANTIZATIONOF SPATIAL INFORMATION USING DIRECTIONALCLUSTERINGFOR MULTICHANNELAUDIO CODING

Binaural cue coding, which is a representing low bit-rate coding of multichannel audio, generates large distortion when the audio data have complex spatial image, such as symphony. Such distortion caused by the low frequency resolution of spatial information be­ cause BCC quantizes the parameters of localization. In this paper we propose a new coding framework by quantizing the spatial in­ formation temporally. The single-channel sum signal is panned to the multiple channels by selecting the prototypes of the spatial fil­ ter. Optimization of the prototypes with minimum coding error is given by a k-means-like clustering of the angles whose centroids are given by the first principal components of the covariances in the classes. The efficiency of the proposed coding with high qual­ ity is verified both in the objective and subjective evaluations.