LAYER CODING FOR COMPRESSED REPRESENTATIONS OF SOUND FIELDS OR SOUND

Abstract

This document relates to a layered encoding method for a compressed sound representation of a sound or sound field. The compressed sound representation comprises a basic compressed sound representation including a plurality of components, basic side information for decoding the basic compressed sound representation into a basic reconstructed sound representation of the sound or sound field, and enhancement side information including parameters for improving the basic reconstruction of the sound representation. The method includes subdividing the plurality of components into a plurality of component groups and assigning each group to a respective layer from a plurality of hierarchical layers, the number of groups corresponding to the number of layers and the plurality.Of layers comprising a base layer and one or more hierarchical enhancement layers, adding the base side information to the base layer and determining a plurality of enhancement side information parts from the enhancement side information and assigning each of the plurality of enhancement side information parts to a respective layer of the plurality of layers, each enhancement side information part comprising parameters for enhancing a reconstructed sound representation that can be obtained from data included in the respective layer and any layer below the respective layer.The document further relates to a method for decoding a compressed sound representation of a sound or sound field, in which the compressed sound representation is encoded in a plurality of hierarchical layers comprising a base layer and one or more hierarchical enhancement layers, and also to an encoder and a decoder for layered encoding of a compressed sound representation.