Until recently, technologies for coding audio signals, such as redundancy reduction and sophisticated source and receiver models did not incorporate spatial characteristics of source and receiving ends. Spatial audio coding achieves much higher compression ratios than conventional coders. It does this by representing multi-channel audio signals as a downmix signal plus side information that describes the perceptually-relevant spatial information.
Written by experts in spatial audio coding, Spatial Audio Processing:
Audio processing research engineers and audio coding research and implementation engineers will find this an insightful guide. Academic audio and psychoacoustic researchers, including post-graduate and third/fourth year students taking courses in signal processing, audio and speech processing, and telecommunications, will also benefit from the information inside.
Christof Faller received an MS (Ing) degree in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2000, and a PhD degree for his work on parametric multi-channel audio coding from EPFL, Switzerland, in 2004. From 2000 to 2004 he worked in the Speech and Acoustics Research Department at bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies and Agere Systems (a Lucent Company), where he worked on audio coding for digital satellite radio, including parametric multi-channel audio coding. He is currently a part-time postdoctoral employee at EPFL. In 2006 he founded Illusonic LLC, an audio and acoustics research company. Dr Faller has won a number of awards for his contributions to spatial audio coding, MP3 surround, and MPEG surround. His main current research interests are spatial hearing and spatial sound capture processing, and reproduction.