A study on harmonic information based vocal removal and enhanced personal audio studio

Abstract

As the first issue of this dissertation, spatial audio object coding (SAOC) schemes are introduced. Interactive audio services (IASs) usually provide users with audio editing functionality and users can render their own sounds according to their preference. For IASs, the original SAOC is an appropriate multi-channel coding tool that satisfies most of the required functionalities with relatively low bit rate. Nevertheless, the SAOC usually fails to remove a specific object successfully, especially the vocal object in the case of the Karaoke service. In addition, to expand the service to mobile environments, not only the lower bit-rate but the lower complexity is required. Thus, we propose a new SAOC vocal harmonic coding technique to improve the background music quality in the Karaoke service. Namely, utilizing the harmonic information of the vocal object, we removed the harmonics of the vocal object remaining in the background music. Our experimental results confirm that the background music quality is improved by the proposed algorithm even with the low bit rate and complexity. In the second issue of this dissertation, we deal with the personal audio studio system (PASS) for the audio object control. As the PASS for the IAS, MUSIC 2.0 is introduced but has two problems. They are a rather high bit-rate and the lack of some necessary functionality. In MUSIC 2.0, the bit-rate is directly proportional to the number of audio objects and it cannot provide the object insertion and change functionality because a user can control only the volume of each object according to his preference. Therefore, we propose a novel PASS with which a user can remove, insert or change object using a spatial audio coding (SAC) scheme. According to the type of the input contents, the object control module I and II edit the multi audio object signals and the SAC-based contents, respectively. To edit the SAC-based contents, the object control module II carries out the object removal and ...