Audio Signal Processing and Coding

10.4 MPEG AUDIO STANDARDS

MPEG is the acronym for Moving Pictures Experts Group that forms a work-group (WG-11) of ISO/IEC JTC-1 subcommittee (SC-29). The main functions of MPEG are: a) to publish technical results and reports related to audio/video compression techniques; b) to define means to multiplex (combine) video, audio, and information bitstreams into a single bitstream, and c) to provide descriptions and syntax for low bit rate audio/video coding tools for Internet and bandwidth-restricted communications applications. MPEG standards do not characterize or provide any rigid encoder specifications, but rather standardizes the type of information that an encoder has to produce as well as the way in which the decoder has to decompress this information. The MPEG workgroup has its own official webpage that can be accessed at [MPEG]. The MPEG video aspect of the standard is beyond the scope of this book, however, we include some tutorial references and relevant standards [LeGal92] [Scha95] [ISO-V96] [Hask97] [Mitc97] [Siko97a] [Siko97b].

Figure 10.5. A typical 3/2-channel configuration described in the ITU-R BS.775-1 standard [ITUR94c]. L: left, C: center, R: right, LS: left surround, and RS: right surround loud speakers. Note that the above figure is not according to a scale.

MPEG Audio – Background. MPEG has come a long way since the first ISO/IEC MPEG standard was published ...