AES London 2010
Workshop W16

Tuesday, May 25, 11:00 — 13:00 (Room C6)

W16 - MPEG Unified Speech and Audio Coding

Chair:
Ralf Geiger, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS - Erlangen, Germany
Panelists:
Philippe Gournay, University of Sherbrooke / VoiceAge
Max Neuendorf, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS - Erlangen, Germany
Lars Villemoes, Dolby

Abstract:
Recently the ISO/MPEG standardization group has launched an activity on unified speech and audio coding (USAC). This codec aims at achieving consistently high quality for speech, music, and mixed content over a broad range of bit rates. This outperforms current state-of-the-art coders. While low bit rate speech codecs focus on efficient representation of speech signals, they fail for music signals. On the other hand, generic audio codecs are designed for any kind of audio signals, but they tend to show unsatisfactory results for speech signals, especially at low bit rates. The new USAC codec unifies the best of both systems. This workshop provides an overview of architecture, performance, and applications of this new unified coding scheme. Experts in the fields of speech coding and audio coding will present details on the technical solutions employed to top-notch unified speech and audio coding.