MPEG-H 3D Audio Decoder Structure and Complexity Analysis

The primary goal of the MPEG-H 3D Audio standard is to provide immersive audio environments for high-resolution broadcasting services such as UHDTV. This standard incorporates a wide range of technologies such as encoding/decoding technology for multi-channel/object/scene-based signal, rendering technology for providing 3D audio in various playback environments, and post-processing technology. The reference software decoder of this standard is a structure combining several modules and can operate in various modes. Each module is composed of independent executable files and executed sequentially, real time decoding is impossible. In this paper, we make DLL library of the core decoder, format converter, object renderer, and binaural renderer of the standard and integrate them to enable frame-based decoding. In addition, by measuring the computation complexity of each mode of the MPEG-H 3D-Audio decoder, this paper also provides a reference for selecting the appropriate decoding mode for various hardware platforms. As a result of the computational complexity measurement, the low complexity profiles included in Korean broadcasting standard has a computation complexity of 2.8 times to 12.4 times that of the QMF synthesis operation in case of rendering as a channel signals, and it has a computation complexity of 4.1 times to 15.3 times of the QMF synthesis operation in case of rendering as a binaural signals.