Facebook's "AI-Powered Hypercompression" Audio Codec
takyon writes:
Using AI to compress audio files for quick and easy sharing
Today, we are detailing progress that our Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team has made in the area of AI-powered hypercompression of audio. Imagine listening to a friend's audio message in an area with low connectivity and not having it stall or glitch. Our research shows how we can use AI to help us achieve this. We built a three-part system and trained it end to end to compress audio data to the size we target. This data can then be decoded using a neural network. We achieve an approximate 10x compression rate compared with MP3 at 64 kbps, without a loss of quality. While such techniques have been explored before for speech, we are the first to make it work for 48 kHz sampled stereo audio (i.e., CD quality), which is the standard for music distribution. We are sharing additional details in a research paper, along with code and samples as part of our commitment to open science.
The new approach can compress and decompress audio in real time to state-of-the-art size reductions. More work needs to be done, but eventually it could lead to improvements such as supporting faster, better-quality calls under poor network conditions and delivering rich metaverse experiences without requiring major bandwidth improvements.
GitHub. Also at Ars Technica.
High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression (arXiv:2210.13438)
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