A spatial priority based scalable audio coding

A spatial priority scheme for scalable audio coding is presented in this paper. To improve the coding quality of important sounds with high attention, especially the moving sound, spatial information is introduced to assign the priorities of frequency subbands. Spatial cues and distance features are extracted in frequency subbands to represent the sound with fast changing direction and distance. Coding priorities are assigned to different frequency subbands according to the energy and spatial information. With trivial added side information and complexity, experimental results show that the perceptual quality is improved especially for the sound with high attention, especially the moving sound in scalable audio coding.