Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) Codec – The New 3GPP Standard for Immersive Communication

The recently standardized 3GPP codec for Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) is the first fully immersive communication codec designed for 5G mobile systems. The IVAS codec is an extension of the mono 3GPP EVS codec and offers additional support for coding and rendering of stereo, multi-channel, scene-based audio (Ambisonics), objects and metadata-assisted spatial audio. The IVAS codec enables completely new service scenarios with interactive stereo and immersive audio in communication, content sharing and distribution. This paper provides an overview of the underlying architecture and new audio coding and rendering technologies. Listening test results show the performance of the new codec in terms of compression efficiency and audio quality.