Wave field coding in the spacetime frequency domain

We present a new method for compressing spatio-temporal audio data for reproduction through Wave Field Synthesis. The data is obtained by sampling the sound field in space at equally-spaced points on a straight line, and transformed into the frequency domain using a spatio-temporal lapped trans- form. The two-dimensional spectrum is quantized using a psychoacoustic model derived for spatio-temporal frequen- cies, which estimates the maximum quantization noise power that each frequency can support in order to preserve trans- parency in the decoded signal. On the decoder side, the in- verse lapped transform recovers the spatio-temporal data. In our experimental results, we verified that the bitrate-efficiency can be improved by increasing either the spatial sampling fre- quency or the spatial resolution of the lapped transform.