IMPROVED FM STEREO RADIO RECEIVER BY USING PARAMETRIC STEREO

摘要

The invention relates to an apparatus (1) for improving a stereo audio signal of an FM stereo radio receiver (10). It is suggested to employ components of a standard HE-ACC v2 decoder (40) in such apparatus (1) to efficiently recover the stereo audio signal (L/R′) while also exhibiting good signal quality. To that end, parametric stereo parameters (15) shall be quantized and submitted to such decoder (40) together with a mono-downmix signal (25). The decoder (25) can then easily recover the parametric stereo parameters (15) by de-quantizing them via a simple lookup table, and finally creating the stereo output signal (L′R′) from the de-quantized parametric stereo parameters and the mono-downmix signal (25). The apparatus (1) further includes a parameter estimation stage (5) which may again be embodied on the basis of components of a standard HE-ACC v2 encoder (65). After estimating the parametric stereo parameters (15) and generating the mono-downmix signal (25), the encoder (65) will not use further encoding other than the already performed PS-coding. An apparatus (1) according to the invention therefore advantageously includes decoder (40) and/or encoder (65) components of a standard HE-ACC v2 codec—utilizing its parametric stereo parameter processing capabilities.