An integrated error correction and detection system for digital audio broadcasting

Hybrid in-band on-channel digital audio broadcasting systems deliver digital audio signals in such a way that is backward compatible with existing analog FM transmission. We present a channel error correction and detection system that is well-suited for use with audio source coders, such as the so-called perceptual audio coder (PAC), that have error concealment/mitigation capabilities. Such error mitigation is quite beneficial for high quality audio signals. The proposed system involves an outer cyclic redundancy check (CRC) code that is concatenated with an inner convolutional code. The outer CRC code is used for error detection, providing flags to trigger the error mitigation routines of the audio decoder. The inner convolutional code consists of so-called complementary punctured-pair convolutional codes, which are specifically tailored to combat the unique adjacent channel interference characteristics of the FM band. We introduce a novel decoding method based on the so-called list Viterbi algorithm (LVA). This LVA-based decoding method, which may be viewed as a type of joint or integrated error correction and detection, exploits the concatenated structure of the channel code to provide enhanced decoding performance relative to decoding methods based on the conventional Viterbi algorithm (VA). We also present results of informal listening tests and other simulations on the Gaussian channel. These results include the preferred length of the outer CRC code for 96-kb/s audio coding and demonstrate that LVA-based decoding can significantly reduce the error flag rate relative to conventional VA-based decoding, resulting in dramatically improved decoded audio quality. Finally, we propose a number of methods for screening undetected errors in the audio domain.