Detecting Bandwidth Variation Artifacts in Perceptual Audio Coding

Datta Roy D, Dick S, Niedermeier A, Adler B. Detecting Bandwidth Variation Artifacts in Perceptual Audio Coding. In: Convention Paper. Audio Engineering Society; 2026. Paper 10298. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23230

@inproceedings{DattaRoy2026_23230,
  author = {Datta Roy, Dipanjan and Dick, Sascha and Niedermeier, Andreas and Adler, Bernd},
  title = {{Detecting Bandwidth Variation Artifacts in Perceptual Audio Coding}},
  note = {Paper 10298},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23230}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Detecting Bandwidth Variation Artifacts in Perceptual Audio Coding
AU  - Datta Roy, Dipanjan
AU  - Dick, Sascha
AU  - Niedermeier, Andreas
AU  - Adler, Bernd
M1  - Paper 10298
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/28
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23230
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Accurate identification of audio coding artifacts is instrumental in encoder design, audio post-processing, and perceptual quality assessment. This paper addresses the detection of artifacts arising from changes in the effective bandwidth of coded audio signals caused by coarse spectral quantization. Such bandwidth variations give rise to two prominent artifact types: bandwidth limitation (BL) and birdies, also referred to as spectral islands (SI). Blind detection methods, requiring no reference signal, are presented for both artifact types. Bandwidth limitation is detected by analyzing variations in the zero crossing count across time domain subband signals, enabling estimation of both fixed and time varying cutoff frequencies. Spectral islands are identified through analysis of the spectrogram by detecting clusters of isolated components in the timefrequency domain, characterized by their temporal and spectral extents. The proposed methods are evaluated using audio material from the ODAQ and USAC verification datasets. Results show that the BL detection method achieves an average bandwidth estimation error of approximately 160 Hz and demonstrates robustness to noisy bandwidth limited signals. In addition, the detected birdie artifacts are perceptually validated through listening tests, indicating an improvement in perceived quality following detection and subsequent suppression of the birdie artifacts.
ER  -