EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 2003:10, 980–992 c 2003 Hindawi Publishing Corporation Progressive Syntax-Rich Coding of Multichannel Audio Sources Dai Yang Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: daiyang@ Hongmei Ai Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: aimee@ Chris Kyriakakis Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: ckyriak@ . Jay Kuo Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: cckuo@. | EURASIP Journal onApplied Signal Processing 2003 10 980-992 2003 Hindawi Publishing Corporation Progressive Syntax-Rich Coding of Multichannel Audio Sources Dai Yang Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering University of Southern California Los Angeles CA 90089-2564 USA Email daiyang@ Hongmei Ai Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering University of Southern California Los Angeles CA 90089-2564 USA Email aimee@ Chris Kyriakakis Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering University of Southern California Los Angeles CA 90089-2564 USA Email ckyriak@ . Jay Kuo Integrated Media Systems Center and Department of Electrical Engineering University of Southern California Los Angeles CA 90089-2564 USA Email cckuo@ Received 6 May 2002 and in revised form 5 March 2003 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
