Primary-Ambient Signal Decomposition and Vector-Based Localization for Spatial Audio Coding and Enhancement

Spatial audio coding and enhancement address the growing commercial need to store and distribute multichannel audio and to render content optimally on arbitrary reproduction systems. In this paper, we discuss a spatial analysis-synthesis scheme which applies principal component analysis to an STFT-domain representation of the original audio to separate it into primary and ambient components, which are then respectively analyzed for cues that describe the spatial percept of the audio scene on a per-tile basis; these cues are used by the synthesis to render the audio appropriately on the available playback system. The proposed framework can be tailored for robust spatial audio coding, or it can be applied directly to enhancement scenarios where there are no rate constraints on the intermediate spatial data and audio representation.