The Perceptual Lossless Quantization of Spatial Parameter for 3D Audio Signals

With the development of multichannel audio systems, the 3D audio systems have already come into our lives. But the increasing number of channels brought challenges to storage and transmission of large amounts of data. Spatial Audio Coding (SAC), the mainstream of 3D audio coding technologies, is key to reproduce 3D multichannel audio signals with efficient compression. Just Noticeable Difference (JND) characteristics of human auditory system can be utilized to reduce spatial perceptual redundancy in the spatial parameters quantization process of SAC. However, the current quantization methods of SAC fully combine the JND characteristics. In this paper, we proposed a Perceptual Lossless Quantization of Spatial Parameter (PLQSP) method, the azimuthal and elevational quantization step sizes of spatial parameters are combined with JNDs. Both objective and subjective experiments have conducted to prove the high efficiency of PLQSP method. Compared with reference method SLQP-L/SLQP-H, the quantization codebook size of PLQSP has decreased by 16.99% and 27.79% respectively, while preserving similar listening quality.