Compression of navigable speech soundfield zones

This paper presents a new coding architecture for the compression of navigable speech soundfield zones. The proposed coding scheme encodes multiple speech soundfields, each representing different spatial zones, into a mono or stereo sound-field mixture signal that can be compressed with an existing speech or audio coder. The resulting compressed signals can be decoded back to individual soundfield zones. Objective and subjective testing results show that the approach successfully compresses up to 3 speech soundfields (each consisting of 4 individual speakers) at a bit rate of 48 kbps whilst maintaining the perceptual quality of each decoded soundfield zone.