Author Description

This invaluable monograph addresses the specific needs of audio-engineering students and researchers who are either learning about the topic or using it as a reference book on multichannel audio compression. This book covers a wide range of knowledge on perceptual audio coding, from basic digital signal processing and data compression techniques to advanced audio coding standards and innovate coding tools. It is the only book available on the market that solely focuses on the principles of high-quality audio codec design for multichannel sound sources. This book includes three parts. The first part covers the basic topics on audio compression, such as quantization, entropy coding, psychoacoustic model, and sound quality assessment. The second part of the book highlights the current most prevalent low-bit-rate high-performance audio coding standards-MPEG-4 audio. More space is given to the audio standards that are capable of supporting multichannel signals, that is, MPEG advance audio coding (AAC), including the original MPEG-2 AAC technology, additional MPEG-4 toolsets, and the most recent aacPlus standard. The third part of this book introduces several innovate multichannel audio coding tools, which have been demonstrated to further improve the coding performance and expand the available functionalities of MPEG AAC, and is more suitable for graduate students and researchers in the advanced level. Dai Tracy Yang is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Chris Kyriakakis is Associated Professor, and C.-C. Jay Kuo is Professor, all affiliated with the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California.