Copyright © 2003 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. 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

Being able to transmit the audio bitstream progressively is a highly desirable property for network transmission. MPEG-4 version 2 audio supports fine grain bit rate scalability in the generic audio coder (GAC). It has a bit-sliced arithmetic coding (BSAC) tool, which provides scalability in the step of 1 Kbps per audio channel. There are also several other scalable audio coding methods, which have been proposed in recent years. However, these scalable audio tools are only available for mono and stereo audio material. Little work has been done on progressive coding of multichannel audio sources. MPEG advanced audio coding (AAC) is one of the most distinguished multichannel digital audio compression systems. Based on AAC, we develop in this work a progressive syntax-rich multichannel audio codec (PSMAC). It not only supports fine grain bit rate scalability for the multichannel audio bitstream but also provides several other desirable functionalities. A formal subjective listening test shows that the proposed algorithm achieves an excellent performance at several different bit rates when compared with MPEG AAC.