Multipoint Control Unit Bit Stream Generation for Audio Quality
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Solution Overview
Problem
The existing multipoint control unit techniques for multipoint phone conferencing experience significant degradation in sound quality and increased operation processing and memory requirements due to the tandem connection of paired coding and decoding, especially when high-compression schemes are used in mobile communication.
Innovation Solution
A multipoint control method that selects one or two points from multiple communication terminals and generates bit streams for unselected terminals using monaural codes representing mixed sound signals and extension codes representing differences between sound signals, reducing the need for tandem coding and decoding processes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of energy
If high-compression coding schemes are used in mobile communication for multipoint conferencing, then transmission efficiency is improved, but sound quality significantly degrades due to tandem connection of paired coding and decoding
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and transmits only the differential information (difference between sound signals) rather than complete decoded sound signals. The multipoint control unit obtains differential information by subtracting a reference sound signal from other sound signals, encodes this differential information, and transmits it to terminals. This eliminates the need for tandem decoding at the control unit while maintaining sound quality, as terminals can reconstruct full sound signals by adding the differential information to the reference signal.
2Reliability
If tandem connection of paired coding and decoding is implemented at the multipoint control unit, then sound quality is maintained, but operation processing amount and memory requirements increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent removes the redundant decoding operation from the multipoint control unit by extracting and transmitting only differential information. Instead of decoding all incoming bit streams, mixing sound signals, re-encoding, and transmitting the results (tandem processing), the control unit simply obtains differential information by subtraction and transmits this compact representation. Terminals perform the final reconstruction locally, eliminating the processing burden at the control unit while preserving sound quality.
3Adaptability or versatility
If complete sound signals are decoded and re-encoded at the multipoint control unit, then all points can be included in the conference, but the processing complexity increases due to multiple decoding and coding operations
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts differential information from incoming sound signals and transmits only this essential difference data to terminals. The multipoint control unit maintains adaptability for any number of conference participants by efficiently managing these differential information streams, while terminals independently reconstruct their assigned sound signals. This approach allows unlimited conference points without increasing processing complexity at the control unit, as it only performs simple subtraction operations rather than full decoding and re-encoding cycles.
Data Source
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AI summary
A technique is provided that can reduce degradation of the sound quality due to a tandem connection of paired coding and decoding, and can reduce the operation processing amount and the required memory amount of a multipoint control unit. In multipoint connection between terminals of a plurality of communication networks (for example, a fixed phone line and a mobile phone line) having different communication capacities, when a multichannel coding including a monaural coding scheme of a communication network having a smaller communication capacity is used in a communication network having a larger communication capacity to transmit sounds of a plurality points to the communication network terminal having the larger communication capacity, control is exercised such that monaural codes of the plurality points are output.