Tonal Component Coding in MPEG-H 3D Audio Standard

This paper describes a Tonal Component Coding (TCC) technique that is an extension tool for the MPEG-H 3D Audio Standard. The method is used in order to enhance the perceptual quality of audio signals with strong and time-varying high frequency (HF) tonal components. At the MPEG-H 3D Audio Core Coder, the TCC tool exploits sinusoidal modeling in order to detect substantial HF tonal content and transform it into the so-called sinusoidal trajectories. A novel parametric coding scheme is applied and the additional data are multiplexed into the bitstream. At the decoder side, the trajectories are reconstructed and merged with the output of the 3D Audio Core Decoder. The TCC was tested as an extension to MPEG-H Audio Reference Quality Encoder in low bitrate (enhanced Spectral Band Replication) and low complexity (Intelligent Gap Filling) operating mode. The subjective listening tests prove the statistical improvement of perceptual quality of signals encoded with proposed technique.