Estimation of auditory spatial cues for Binaural Cue Coding

Binaural Cue Coding (BCC) offers a compact parametric representation of auditory spatial information. This representation can be applied to stereophonic or multi-channel audio compression. It allows to reconstruct the spatial image given a mono audio signal and spatial cues that require only a low data volume. This paper focuses on the extraction of the spatial cues from a stereophonic signal with a BCC analyzer. Results of a first subjective quality evaluation confirm that this technique is able to approximate the spatial image of critical reference signals. Thus BCC has the potential to offer highly efficient stereophonic or multi-channel coding, even at very low bit rates that currently permit coding of only one mono channel.