California Inventors Develop Packet Voice Conferencing System

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 26 -- Shmuel Shaffer of Palo Alto, Calif., and Michael E. Knappe of San Jose, Calif., have developed systems and methods for packet voice conferencing.

According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An encoding system accepts two sound field signals, representing the same sound field sampled at two spatially-separated points. The relative delay between the two sound field signals is detected over a given time interval. The sound field signals are combined and then encoded as a single audio signal, e.g., by a method suitable for monophonic voice over Internet protocol. The encoded audio payload and the relative delay are placed in one or more packets and sent to a decoding device via the packet network."

An abstract of the invention, released by the Patent Office, said: "The decoding device uses the relative delay to drive a playout splitter--once the encoded audio payload has been decoded, the playout splitter creates multiple presentation channels by inserting the transmitted relative delay in the decoded signal for one (or more) of the presentation channels. The listener thus perceives a speaker's voice as originating from a location related to the speaker's physical position at the other end of the conference. An advantage of these embodiments is that a pseudo-stereo conference can be conducted with virtually the same bandwidth as a monophonic conference."

The inventors were issued U.S. Patent No. 7,194,084 on March 20. The patent has been assigned to Cisco Technology Inc., San Jose. The original application was filed on Sept. 28, 2005, and is available at: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,194,084.PN.&OS=PN/7,194,084&RS=PN/7,194,084.

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