Sound source location cue coding system for compact representation of multi-channel audio

Binaural cue coding (BCC) has been introduced for compact representation of multi-channel audio. It exploits binaural cue parameters for capturing the spatial image of multi-channel audio. Recently, it has been standardized within MPEG as the name of "MPEG Surround." In this paper, we propose a sound source location cue coding (SSLCC) system for compressing multi-channel audio to be suitable at the narrow bandwidth transmission environment. To improve the compression ability of the conventional BCC, the SSLCC system utilizes the virtual source location information (VSLI) as a spatial cue parameter instead of the inter-channel level difference (ICLD) of the BCC system. Also the SSLCC system adopts enhanced pre/post processing algorithms to improve perceptual sound quality. Objective and subjective assessment results show that the proposed SSLCC system reveals better performance than the conventional BCC system.