Error-resilient design of high-fidelity scalable audio coding
Dai Tracy Yang, Hongmei Ai, Christos Kyriakakis, C.‐C. Jay Kuo · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2002
Current high quality audio coding techniques mainly focus on coding efficiency, which makes them extremely sensitive to channel noise, especially in high error rate wireless channels. In our previous work, we developed a progressive high quality audio codec, which was shown to outperform MPEG-4 version 2's scalable audio codec. In this work, we extend the error-free progressive audio codec to an error-resilient scalable audio codec by re-organizing the bitstream and modifying the noiseless coding module. A dynamic segmentation scheme is used to divide an audio bitstream into several segments. Each segment contains independently decodable data so that errors will not propagate across segment boundaries. An unequal error protection scheme is then adopted to improve error resilience of the final bitstream. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested under different error patterns of WCDMA channels with several test audio materials. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves excellent error resilience at a regular user bit rate of 64 kb/s.