Robust Parametric Audio Coding Using Multiple Description Coding

We propose a new multiple description spherical quantization with repetitively coded amplitudes (MDSQRA) scheme suited for quantization of sinusoidal parameters. The quantization scheme is constituted by a set of spherical quantizers inspired by the multiple description spherical trellis-coded quantization (MDSTCQ) scheme. In this scheme, we apply repetitive coding on the amplitudes, while multiple description coding are applied on the phases and frequencies. Thereby, MDSQRA becomes directly implementable, as opposed to MDSTCQ, since the phase and frequency quantizers depend on the amplitudes which have dissimilar descriptions in MDSTCQ. Furthermore, we implement MDSQRA into a perceptual matching pursuit based sinusoidal audio coder. Finally, we evaluate MDSQRA through perceptual distortion measurements and MUSHRA listening tests. The tests show that MDSQRA outperforms MDSTCQ with respect to a expected perceptual distortion measure. The same results are obtained through the MUSHRA tests performed on sound clips coded using MDSQRA and MDSTCQ.