Interactive teleconferencing combining spatial audio object coding and DirAC technology

The importance of telecommunication continues to grow in our everyday lives. An ambitious goal for developers is to provide the most natural way of audio communication by giving users the impression of being located next to each other. MPEG Spatial Audio Object Coding (SAOC) is a technology for coding, transmitting, and interactively reproducing spatial sound scenes on any conventional multi-loudspeaker setup (e.g., ITU 5.1). This paper describes how Directional Audio Coding (DirAC) can be used as recording front-end for SAOC-based teleconference systems to capture acoustic scenes and to extract the individual objects (talkers). By introducing a novel DirAC to SAOC parameter transcoder, a highly efficient way of combining both technologies is presented that enables interactive, object-based spatial teleconferencing.