16.1 Overview
Lossy compression schemes can be based on a source model, as in the case of speech compression, or a user or sink model, as is somewhat the case in image compression. In this chapter we look at audio compression approaches that are explicitly based on the model of the user. We will look at audio compression approaches in the context of audio compression standards.
Principally, we will examine the different MPEG standards for audio compression. These include MPEG Layer I, Layer II, Layer III (or mp3) and the Advanced Audio Coding Standard. As with other standards described in this book, the goal here is not to provide all the details required for implementation. Rather the goal is to provide the reader with enough familiarity so that they can then find it much easier to understand these standards.
16.2 Introduction
The various speech coding algorithms we studied in the previous chapter rely heavily on the speech production model to identify structures in the speech signal that can be used for compression. Audio compression systems have taken, in some sense, the opposite tack.
Unlike speech signals, audio signals can be generated using a large number of different mechanisms. Lacking a unique model for audio production, the audio compression methods have focused on the unique model for audio perception, a psychoacoustic model for hearing.
At the heart of the techniques described in this chapter is a psychoacoustic model of human perception. By identifying what can and, more important what cannot be heard, the schemes described in this chapter obtain much of their compression by discarding information that cannot be perceived.
The motivation for the development of many of these perceptual coders was their potential application in broadcast multimedia. However, their major impact has been in the distribution of audio over the Internet.
We live in an environment rich in auditory stimuli. Even an environment described as quiet is filled with all kinds of natural and artificial sounds. The sounds are always present and come to us from all directions. Living in this stimulus-rich environment, it is essential that we have mechanisms for ignoring some of the stimuli and focusing on others.
Over the course of our evolutionary history we have developed limitations on what we can hear. Some of these limitations are physiological, based on the machinery of hearing. Others are psychological, based on how our brain processes auditory stimuli.
The insight of researchers in audio coding has been the understanding that these limitations can be useful in selecting information that needs to be encoded and information that can be discarded. The limitations of human perception are incorporated into the compression process through the use of psychoacoustic models. We briefly describe the auditory model used by the most popular audio compression approaches. Our description is necessarily superficial and we refer readers interested in more detail to [97, 194].
The machinery of hearing is frequency dependent. The variation of what is perceived as equally loud at different frequencies was first measured by Fletcher and Munson at Bell Labs in the mid-1930s [96]. These measurements of perceptual equivalence were later refined by Robinson and Dadson. This dependence is usually displayed as a set of equal loudness curves, where the sound pressure level (SPL) is plotted as a function of frequency for tones perceived to be equally loud.
Clearly, what two people think of as equally loud will be different. Therefore, these curves are actually averages and serve as a guide to human auditory perception.
The particular curve that is of special interest to us is the threshold-of hearing curve. This is the SPL curve that delineates the boundary of audible and inaudible sounds at different frequencies. In Figure 16.1 we show a plot of this audibility threshold in quiet.
Figure 16.1: A typical plot of the audibility threshold.
Sounds that lie below the threshold are not perceived by humans. Thus, we can see that a low amplitude sound at a frequency of 3 kHz may be perceptible while the same level of sound at 100 Hz would not be perceived.
16.2.1 Spectral Masking
Lossy compression schemes require the use of quantization at some stage. Quantization can be modeled as an additive noise process in which the output of the quantizer is the input plus the quantization noise.
To hide quantization noise, we can make use of the fact that signals below a particular amplitude at a particular frequency are not audible. If we select the quantizer step size such that the quantization noise lies below the audibility threshold, the noise will not be perceived.
Furthermore, the threshold of audibility is not absolutely fixed and typically rises when multiple sounds impinge on the human ear. This phenomenon gives rise to spectral masking. A tone at a certain frequency will raise the threshold in a critical band around that frequency. These critical bands have a constant Q, which is the ratio of frequency to bandwidth.
Thus, at low frequencies the critical band can have a bandwidth as low as 100 Hz, while at higher frequencies the bandwidth can be as large as 4 kHz. This increase of the threshold has major implications for compression. Consider the situation in Figure 16.2.
Figure 16.2: Change in the audibility threshold.
Here a tone at 1 kHz has raised the threshold of audibility so that the adjacent tone above it in frequency is no longer audible. At the same time, while the tone at 500 Hz is audible, because of the increase in the threshold the tone can be quantized more crudely. This is because increase of the threshold will allow us to introduce more quantization noise at that frequency. The degree to which the threshold is increased depends on a variety of factors, including whether the signal is sinusoidal or atonal.
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