COMPRESSION TRANSPARENT LOW−LEVEL DESCRIPTION OF AUDIO SIGNALS (WedPmOR5)

A new low level audio descriptor that represents the psycho−acoustic noise floor shape of an audio frame is proposed. Results presented indicate that the proposed descriptor is far more resilient to compression noise than any of the MPEG−7 low level audio descriptors. In fact, across a wide range of files, on average the proposed scheme fails to uniquely identify only five frames in every ten thousand. In addition, the proposed descriptor maintains a high resilience to compression noise even when decimated to use only one quarter of the values per frame to represent the noise floor. This characteristic indicates the proposed descriptor presents a truly scalable mechanism for transparently describing the characteristics of an audio frame.