Low Bitrate Coding of Spot Audio Signals for Interactive and Immersive Audio Applications

In the last few years, a revolution has occurred in the area of consumer audio. Similarly to the transition from analog to digital sound that took place during the 80s, we have been experiencing the transition from 2-channel stereophonic sound to multichannel sound (e.g., 5.1 systems). Future audiovisual systems will not make distinctions regarding whether the user will be watching a movie or listening to a music recording; they are envisioned to offer a realistic experience to the user who will be immersed into the content, implying that the user will be able to interact with the content according to his will. In this paper, an encoding procedure is proposed, focusing on spot microphone signals, which is necessary for providing interactivity between the user and the environment. A model is proposed which achieves high-quality audio reproduction with side information for each spot microphone signal in the order of 19 kbps.