Adaptive Karhunen-Loeve transform for enhanced multichannel audio coding

A modified MPEG Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) scheme based on the Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT) to remove inter-channel redundancy, which is called the MAACKL method, has been proposed in our previous work. However, a straightforward coding of elements of the KLT matrix generates about 240 bits per matrix for typical 5 channel audio contents. Such an overhead is too expensive so that it prevents MAACKL from updating KLT dynamically in a short period of time. In this research, we study the de-correlation efficiency of adaptive KLT as well as an efficient way to encode elements of the KLT matrix via vector quantization. The effect due to different quantization accuracy and adaptation period is examined carefully. It is demonstrated that with the smallest possible number of bits per matrix and a moderately long KLT adaptation time, the MAACKL algorithm can still generate a very good coding performance.