Error concealment scheme for MPEG-AAC

Abstract

MPEG-AAC is the state-of-the-art in audio compression technology. Promising CD quality at 64 kbps, AAC is the leading option for low bandwidth audio streaming applications. In spite of the support from channel coding and the error resilience features of AAC itself, handling erroneous transmission requires the decoder to be equipped with error concealment scheme to cater for missing packets. However, complexity is limited by the real time requirement in this application. We present in this paper a novel scheme of error concealment, specifically for AAC. This scheme exploits the time domain aliasing cancellation property of MDCT based codec and the block-switching feature of AAC. Preliminary simulations show significant improvement in both error performance and subjective quality testing compared to general method of concealment. The scheme does not introduce major computational load, and hence suitable for real time low power decoder