Converting audio signals captured in different formats into a reduced number of formats to simplify encoding and decoding operations

Claims

1. A method comprising: receiving, by a simplification stage, from an audio pre-processing stage, audio signals in a plurality of formats and audio signal metadata; receiving, by the simplification stage, from a device attributes of the device, wherein the attributes comprise one or more audio formats supported by the device, wherein the one or more audio formats include at least one of monophonic, stereophonic or spatial; converting, by the simplification stage, the audio signals into a receiving format compatible with the one or more audio formats; and providing, by the simplification stage, the converted audio signal to an encoding / decoding stage for processing in the downstream direction.

2. The method according to claim 1, characterized in that each of the audio pre-processing stage, the simplification stage, and the encoding / decoding stage contains one or more computer processors.

3. The method according to claim 1, characterized in that one or more audio formats include a spatial intermediate format that includes a representation as m objects and an HOA representation of the n-th order (“mObj+HOAn”), where m and n are small integers.

4. The method according to claim 1, characterized in that the encoding / decoding stage is a processing stage compatible with immersive audio services (IVAS).

5. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium that stores instructions that, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising: receiving, by a simplification stage, from an audio pre-processing stage, audio signals in a plurality of formats and audio signal metadata; receiving, by the simplification stage, from a device attributes of the device, wherein the attributes comprise one or more audio formats supported by the device, wherein the one or more audio formats include at least one of monophonic, stereophonic, or spatial; converting, by the simplification stage, the audio signals into a receiving format compatible with the one or more audio formats; and providing, by the simplification stage, the converted audio signal to an encoding / decoding stage for downstream processing.

6. A system comprising: one or more processors; and a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising: receiving, by a simplification stage, from an audio pre-processing stage, audio signals in a plurality of formats and audio signal metadata; receiving, by the simplification stage, from a device, attributes of the device, wherein the attributes comprise one or more audio formats supported by the device, wherein the one or more audio formats include at least one of monophonic, stereophonic, or spatial; converting, by the simplification stage, the audio signals into a receiving format compatible with the one or more audio formats; and providing, by the simplification stage, the converted audio signal to an encoding / decoding stage for downstream processing.