Google’s SoundStream codec simultaneously suppresses noise and compresses audio

guest · Aug 13, 2021

Google’s SoundStream codec simultaneously suppresses noise and compresses audio
August 12, 2021
https://venturebeat.com/2021/08/12/...eously-suppresses-noise-and-compresses-audio/

Google today detailed SoundStream, an end-to-end “neural” audio codec that can provide higher-quality audio while encoding different sound types, including clean speech, noisy and reverberant speech, music, and environmental sounds. The company claims this is the first AI-powered codec to work on speech and music while being able to run in real time on a smartphone processor at the same time.

Earlier this year, Google released Lyra, a neural audio codec trained to compress low-bitrate speech. SoundStream extends this work with a system consisting of an encoder, decoder, and quantizer.
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In traditional audio processing pipelines, compression and enhancement — i.e., the removal of background noise — are typically performed by different modules. But SoundStream is designed to carry out compression and enhancement at the same time.

At 3kbps, SoundStream outperforms the popular Opus codec at 12kbps and approaches the quality of EVS at 9.6kbps while using 3.2-4 times fewer bits, Google claims. Moreover, SoundStream performs better than the current version of Lyra when compared at the same bitrate.
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Google: SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec

Conclusion
Efficient compression is necessary whenever one needs to transmit audio, whether when streaming a video, or during a conference call. SoundStream is an important step towards improving machine learning-driven audio codecs. It outperforms state-of-the-art codecs, such as Opus and EVS, can enhance audio on demand, and requires deployment of only a single scalable model, rather than many.

SoundStream will be released as a part of the next, improved version of Lyra. By integrating SoundStream with Lyra, developers can leverage the existing Lyra APIs and tools for their work, providing both flexibility and better sound quality. We will also release it as a separate TensorFlow model for experimentation.
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Google’s SoundStream codec simultaneously suppresses noise and compresses audio

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