Spherical Vector Quantization for Spatial Direction Coding

We address in this paper the problem of designing high bit-rate spherical vector quantization (VQ) to achieve transparent joint coding of angular values (azimuth and elevation) representing source directions in parametric spatial audio coding. We present the design of three coding methods using an optimized 3D grid and evaluate their performance/complexity at a bitrate of 16 bits per spatial direction. A comparison with VQ based on existing 3D spherical grids is provided for benchmarking purposes.