Techniques for measurement of perceptual audio quality
First Claim
1. A storage medium having stored therein computer-executable instructions for causing a computer programmed thereby to perform a method of encoding audio, the method comprising:
- encoding audio organized as plural blocks of audio data, including measuring quality of the plural blocks of audio data, wherein each of the plural blocks has one of plural available block sizes, and wherein the measuring comprises, for each of the plural blocks of audio data;
normalizing the block, including one or more of;
normalizing amplitude scale of plural values in the block to compensate for changes in the amplitude scale relating to block size of the block; and
normalizing the block size of the block to compensate for block size variation among the plural blocks of audio data; and
computing a quality measure for the normalized block;
and outputting the encoded audio in a bit stream.
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Abstract
An audio processing tool measures the quality of reconstructed audio data. For example, an audio encoder measures the quality of a block of reconstructed frequency coefficient data in a quantization loop. The invention includes several techniques and tools, which can be used in combination or separately. First, before measuring quality, the tool normalizes the block to account for variation in block sizes. Second, for the quality measurement, the tool processes the reconstructed data by critical bands, which can differ from the quantization bands used to compress the data. Third, the tool accounts for the masking effect of the reconstructed data, not just the masking effect of the original data. Fourth, the tool band weights the quality measurement, which can be used to account for noise substitution or band truncation. Finally, the tool changes quality measurement techniques depending on the channel coding mode.
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Citations
26 Claims
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1. A storage medium having stored therein computer-executable instructions for causing a computer programmed thereby to perform a method of encoding audio, the method comprising:
encoding audio organized as plural blocks of audio data, including measuring quality of the plural blocks of audio data, wherein each of the plural blocks has one of plural available block sizes, and wherein the measuring comprises, for each of the plural blocks of audio data; normalizing the block, including one or more of; normalizing amplitude scale of plural values in the block to compensate for changes in the amplitude scale relating to block size of the block; and normalizing the block size of the block to compensate for block size variation among the plural blocks of audio data; and computing a quality measure for the normalized block;
and outputting the encoded audio in a bit stream.- View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
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10. An audio encoder comprising:
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one or more processors; memory; at least one input device, output device or communication connection; and one or more storage media storing computer-executable instructions for causing the audio encoder to perform a method comprising; encoding audio, including; using a frequency transformer to transform a time domain block of audio samples into a transform block of frequency coefficients, wherein the transform block has a transform block size selected from among plural available transform block sizes; and using a program module to normalize the transform block, wherein the normalizing the transform block comprises; normalizing amplitude scale of plural coefficient values in the transform block to compensate for changes in the amplitude scale relating to the transform block size of the transform block; and normalizing the transform block size of the transform block to compensate for transform block size variation; and outputting the encoded audio in a bit stream. - View Dependent Claims (11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)
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17. An audio encoder comprising:
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one or more processors; memory; at least one input device, output device or communication connection; and one or more storage media storing computer-executable instructions for causing the audio encoder to perform a method comprising; encoding audio, including; using a frequency transformer to transform a time domain block of audio samples into a transform block of frequency coefficients, wherein the transform block has a transform block size selected from among plural available transform block sizes; using a program module to normalize the transform block, wherein the normalizing comprises for each frequency coefficient in the transform block, repeating the frequency coefficient by an expansion factor in the normalized transform block, wherein the expansion factor is proportional to ratio of maximum transform block size to the transform block size of the transform block; and outputting the encoded audio in a bit stream.
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18. In an audio encoder, a computer-implemented method comprising:
encoding audio organized as plural blocks of audio data, wherein the encoding includes measuring quality of the plural blocks of audio data, wherein each of the plural blocks has one of plural available block sizes, and wherein the measuring quality comprises, for each of the plural blocks of audio data; normalizing the block, including one or more of; normalizing amplitude scale of plural values in the block to compensate for changes in the amplitude scale relating to block size of the block; and normalizing the block size of the block to compensate for block size variation among the plural blocks of audio data; and computing a quality measure for the normalized block; and
outputting the encoded audio in a bit stream.- View Dependent Claims (19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26)
Specification