音频处理中的瞬态概念 Transient phenomena of Audio Signal Proccess

在Opus编解码的学习中，常常看到Transient这一概念。今天查了Wiki之后，有以下有用的信息，记录一下。对Transient进行了粗略的翻译，引出的Pre-echo原文贴出。

 

Wiki词条中提到的MDCT刚好是CELT在使用的，文末涉及的理念Time-Freqeuncy resolution trade-off也在CELT中被提及。

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在声学和语音领域，瞬态是一段波形的开端中，一个高幅值，短持续时间的声音。这一现象存在于音乐，噪音和语音中。

瞬态不直接依赖于音调的频率。

瞬态包含高度非周期的分量，拥有比高频分量的谐波更高的幅值。

瞬态很难用音频压缩算法进行编码，会导致pre-echo.

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Pre-echo, sometimes called a forward echo, (not to be confused with reverse echo) is a digital audio compression artifact where a sound is heard before it occurs (hence the name). It is most noticeable in impulsive sounds from percussion instruments such as castanets or cymbals.

It occurs in transform-based audio compression algorithms – typically based on the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) – such as MP3, MPEG-4 AAC, and Vorbis, and is due to quantization noise being spread over the entire transform-window of the codec.

Cause

The psychoacoustic component of the effect is that one hears only the echo preceding the transient, not the one following – because this latter is drowned out by the transient. Formally, forward temporal masking is much stronger than backwards temporal masking, hence one hears a pre-echo, but no post-echo.

Mitigation

In an effort to avoid pre-echo artifacts, many sound processing systems use filters where all of the response occurs after the main impulse, rather than linear phase filters. Such filters necessarily introduce phase distortion and temporal smearing, but this additional distortion is less audible because of strong forward masking.

Avoiding pre-echo is a substantial design difficulty in transform domain lossy audio codecs such as MP3, MPEG-4 AAC, and Vorbis. It is also one of the problems encountered in digital room correction algorithms and frequency domain filters in general (denoising by spectral subtraction, equalization, and others). One way of reducing "breathing" for filters and compression techniques using piecewise Fourier-based transforms is picking a smaller transform window (short blocks in MP3), thus increasing the temporal resolution of the algorithm at the cost of reducing its frequency resolution.

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翻译/引用来源：

维基词条：Transient(acoustics), Pro-echo

图片来源：Recording Drums