Higher-Order Ambisonics Codec (HOAC)

Parametric spatial audio codec based on Higher-Order Directional Audio Coding (HO-DirAC).

Companion page http://research.spa.aalto.fi/publications/papers/hoac/.

The encoder extracts a set of transport audio channels and metadata. The decoder reconstructs low orders, and resynthesizes high orders from the input parameterization.

The audio transport channel coding uses Opus in discrete channel mode (implemented also here and here). It is also possible to use other audio-codecs.

The codec is currently prototyped for 5th order HOA (and higher), at a total bit rate of ~512 kbit/s for 'low', ~768 kbit/s for 'med', and ~1280kbit for 'high' profiles.

Reference implementation for papers:

[C. Hold, L. McCormack, A. Politis and V. Pulkki, "Perceptually-Motivated Spatial Audio Codec for Higher-Order Ambisonics Compression", Accepted at IEEE ICASSP, 2024]

[C. Hold, L. McCormack, A. Politis and V. Pulkki, "Optimizing Higher-Order Directional Audio Coding with Adaptive Mixing and Energy Matching for Ambisonic Compression and Upmixing," 2023 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA), 2023.]

[C. Hold, V. Pulkki, A. Politis and L. McCormack, "Compression of Higher-Order Ambisonic Signals Using Directional Audio Coding," in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 32, 2024.]

Quickstart

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/chris-hld/hoac.git

It's a good idea to use conda for the python environment and package management

conda create --name hoac python=3.11 numpy scipy matplotlib portaudio cffi

To use the new environment

conda activate hoac

Then download and install spaudiopy and safpy. For spaudiopy, in the conda environment, you can use for example

pip install spaudiopy

For safpy you need to follow the build instructions in its safpy-README.

Opus can be installed from source here, or through most system package managers. By default, HOAC uses these Python bindings which can be installed for example with

 pip install git+https://github.com/chris-hld/opuslib.git@master

If all dependencies are met, an example encoder and decoder shows the basic functionality.

Details

If you would like to explore beyond the provided interfaces please reach out! All function docstrings can be shown e.g. with

In [1]: import hoac

In [2]: hoac.grouped_sector_parameters??
Signature:      hoac.grouped_sector_parameters(x_nm, A_wxyz_c, M_grouper, TRANSPOSE=False)
Call signature: hoac.grouped_sector_parameters(*args, **kwargs)
Type:           cython_function_or_method
String form:    <cyfunction grouped_sector_parameters at 0x7f9d83048fb0>
Docstring:     
Sector S parameters from SH signals L, frequency K band G grouped.

Parameters
----------
x_nm : np.ndarray
    L x K.
A_wxyz_c : np.ndarray, complex
    4*S x L.
M_grouper : np.ndarray
    K x G.
TRANSPOSE : np.ndarray, optional
    The default is False.

Returns
-------
azi_s, zen_s, dif_s, ene_s, int_s : np.ndarray
    S x G, or 3*S x G, or transposed

---

Tested against these forks/branches: https://github.com/chris-hld/opus/tree/update_ambi_map3, https://github.com/chris-hld/opusfile/tree/channel-mapping-2-and-3, https://github.com/chris-hld/opus-tools/tree/channels-individual