Improved Synthesis Method of Negative Inter-channel Correlation Parameter Based on Anti-phase Primary Component

Abstract

Parametric stereo(PS) and MPEG surround(MPS) are major spatial audio coding(SAC) tools. In this paper, the problem of the inter-channel correlation(ICC) synthesis in the conventional SAC is analyzed. Conventional methods assume that ambient components mixed to two output channels are anti-phased, while the primary components are assumed to be in-phased. This assumption can cause excessive ambient mixing for a negative-valued ICC. As a remedy to this problem, we propose a new ICC synthesis method based on an assumption that the primary components are anti-phased each other for a negative ICC. The proposed method is also applied to the approximation which works in practice. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by computer simulations and the subjective listening tests verified that the proposed method is effective in not only headphones but also loudspeakers playback.