Vocal Removal From Multiobject Audio Using Harmonic Information for Karaoke Service

Interactive audio services (IASs) usually provide users with audio editing functionality and they can render their own sounds according to their preference. For IASs, the spatial audio object coding (SAOC) is an appropriate multichannel coding tool that satisfies most of the required functionalities with relatively low bit rate. Nevertheless, the SAOC usually fails to remove a specific object successfully, especially the vocal object in the case of the Karaoke service. In addition, to expand the service to mobile environments, lower bit rate and complexity are required. Thus, we propose a new SAOC vocal harmonic coding technique to improve the background music quality in the Karaoke service. Namely, utilizing the harmonic information of the vocal object, we removed the harmonics of the vocal object remaining in the background music. Our experimental results confirm that the background music quality is improved by the proposed algorithm even with the low bit rate and complexity.