Welcome to the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen

The International Audio Laboratories Erlangen (AudioLabs) are a joint institution of Fraunhofer IIS and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). The AudioLabs were founded in 2010 and are unique worldwide in both its mission and international approach: A team of globally-renowned scientists is working to shape the future of audio and multimedia technologies in research areas such as audio coding, audio signal analysis and perceptual spatial audio signal processing.

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Highlight of Current Research

A Novel Frequency Domain Prediction Method for Low Delay General Audio Coding

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Research on audio signal analysis exploits the signal characteristics, utilizes the knowledge of psychoacoustics based on the human auditory system, and aims to discover more potential of what can be achieved with audio processing, and thus continues to challenge the boundary of state-of-art audio coding technologies.

In a recently published journal article, joint expertise in various fields of audio signal analysis leads to the proposal of a novel long-term prediction (LTP) method for low delay transform domain general audio coders.

This frequency domain joint harmonics prediction (FDJHP) method provides transform based general audio codecs with an LTP tool to reduce the redundancy which exists in periodic or quasi-periodic audio signal components. Those components occur e.g. in music containing dominant single instrument signals and in voiced speech. The FDJHP method enables joint prediction of harmonic components, even if they heavily overlap in their influence on their spectral representation. That overlap is usually observed in low delay audio coding scenarios, where coding delays are required to be as low as a few milliseconds.

Performance analysis using bitrate savings and a listening test using test signals with strong harmonic components indicate that FDJHP can improve the coding efficiency greatly. Further experiments show that FDJHP can be combined with existing techniques into an adaptive system, where different prediction methods can complement each other.

Read the article at IEEE. Learn more about the research field Audio Signal Analysis.

Highlight of Current Education

The AudioLabs professors offer lectures in different research areas in which they share their expertise. As part of our education activities, we create interactive and multimodal lecture material. Check out an example video on time-frequency representations:

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