System and method for improving audio quality on a conferencing network
US6240070A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Oct 9, 1998 |
| Grant date | May 29, 2001 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Oct 9, 2018 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
- CPC primaryH04M3/568
- WIPO fieldTelecommunications
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A conferencing system (100) improves audio quality by identifying and selectively allowing a dominant audio channel to bypass a lossy compression transformation included in a server 102. The system (100) places conference calls over a network (106) and includes the conference server (102), having an input interface (200), a decompressor (202), a summation circuit (212), a correlation unit (206) a compressor (214), and an output interface (220). The input interface (200) receives a plurality of audio channels, each being compressed using a lossy compression algorithm. The decompressor (202) decompresses each of the incoming channels to produce a plurality of decompressed audio channels, which are then summed by the summation circuit (212) to produce a summation stream. The compressor (214) compresses the summation stream to produce a first audio output. The correlation unit (206) identifies a dominant channel from the incoming compressed audio channels. The dominant channel bypasses decompressor (202) and compressor (214) to be directly output as a second audio channel. The first and second output channels are then transmitted over the network (106) to a plurality of clients (103-10…
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.