High efficiency stereo audio compression method using polar coordinate principle component analysis for wireless communications

High efficiency audio compression is the basic technology in audio involved multimedia communications. Downmixing and parametric coding is efficient coding scheme with wide applications in some up-to-date audio codecs such as Parametric Stereo (PS) in EAAC+ and MPEG-Surround. Principle Component Analysis (PCA) stereo coding followed this idea to map two channels to one channel with maximum energy and parameterize the secondary channel. This paper investigates the conventional PCA method performance under general stereo model with multiple sound sources and different directions, and then proposes a Polar Coordinate based PCA (PC-PCA) stereo coding method. It has been proved that when multiple sound sources exist with different directions, PC-PCA is better than the conventional PCA method when Mean to Standard deviation Ratio (MSR) is large. A stereo codec based on PC-PCA is proposed to validate the performance improvement of proposed method. Objective and subjective tests show the proposed method achieves a comparative quality and saves 50% parameter bit rate comparing with conventional PCA method, and obtains a 4–8 MUSHRA scores improvement comparing with state-of-the-art stereo codec at the same parameter bit rate.