EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing
Volume 2009 (2009), Article ID 468971, 21 pages
doi:10.1155/2009/468971
Review Article

An Overview of the Coding Standard MPEG-4 Audio Amendments 1 and 2: HE-AAC, SSC, and HE-AAC v2

A. C. den Brinker,1 J. Breebaart,1 P. Ekstrand,2 J. Engdegård,2 F. Henn,2 K. Kjörling,2 W. Oomen,3 and H. Purnhagen2

1Philips Research Laboratories, High Tech Campus 36, 5656 AE Eindhoven, The Netherlands
2Dolby Sweden AB, Gävlegatan 12 A, 11330 Stockholm, Sweden
3Philips Applied Technologies Eindhoven, High Tech Campus 5, 5656 AE Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Received 29 September 2008; Accepted 24 February 2009

Academic Editor: James Kates

Copyright © 2009 A. C. den Brinker et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In 2003 and 2004, the ISO/IEC MPEG standardization committee added two amendments to their MPEG-4 audio coding standard. These amendments concern parametric coding techniques and encompass Spectral Band Replication (SBR), Sinusoidal Coding (SSC), and Parametric Stereo (PS). In this paper, we will give an overview of the basic ideas behind these techniques and references to more detailed information. Furthermore, the results of listening tests as performed during the final stages of the MPEG-4 standardization process are presented in order to illustrate the performance of these techniques.