Directional coding of audio using a circular microphone array

We propose a real-time method for coding an acoustic environment based on estimating the Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) and reproducing it using an arbitrary loudspeaker configuration or headphones. We encode the sound field with the use of one audio signal and side-information. The audio signal can be further encoded with an MP3 encoder to reduce the bitrate. We investigate how such coding can affect the spatial impression and sound quality of spatial audio reproduction. Also, we propose a lossless efficient compression scheme for the side-information. Our method is compared with other recently proposed microphone array based methods for directional coding. Listening tests confirm the effectiveness of our method in achieving excellent reconstruction of the sound field while maintaining the sound quality at high levels.