Performance of lossless audio coding technology for binaural audio applications

Multimedia technology, including audio compression, is currently growing rapidly. Various compression techniques have been developed, which can be classified as lossy and lossless. The lossless audio compression technique is favorable because it can reconstruct the compressed audio without distortion. In this paper, the authors investigate the performance of lossless audio compression for various channel conditions for applications of binaural audio. Binaural audio allows one to enjoy three-dimensional (3D) sound using headphones. In the experiments, binaural audio is represented with 16 and 24 bits per sample variation. The compressed audio is transmitted and added to white noise with a specified power variation to assess the performance of a lossless audio codec under a noisy channel. The audio quality was tested using three methods: subjective assessment according to the ITU-R BS.1116-3 standard, the objective according to the ITU-R standard BS.1387-1, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Based on this research, it can be concluded that the higher the input white noise, the lower the audio quality.