MPEG-H 3D Audio—The New Standard for Coding of Immersive Spatial Audio
Jürgen Herre, Johannes Hilpert, Achim Kuntz, Jan Plogsties · IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing · 2015
The science and art of Spatial Audio is concerned with the capture, production, transmission, and reproduction of an immersive sound experience. Recently, a new generation of spatial audio technology has been introduced that employs elevated and lowered loudspeakers and thus surpasses previous `surround sound' technology without such speakers in terms of listener immersion and potential for spatial realism. In this context, the ISO/MPEG standardization group has started the MPEG-H 3D Audio development effort to facilitate high-quality bitrate-efficient production, transmission and reproduction of such immersive audio material. The underlying format is designed to provide universal means for carriage of channel-based, object-based and Higher Order Ambisonics based input. High quality reproduction is provided for many output formats from 22.2 and beyond down to 5.1, stereo and binaural reproduction-independently of the original encoding format, thus overcoming the incompatibility between various 3D formats. This paper provides an overview of the MPEG-H 3D Audio project and technology and an assessment of the system capabilities and performance.