HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE SIMULTANEOUS SIGNAL COMPOSITING, APPLIED TO AUDIO

High Dynamic Range (HDR) compositing is well established in the field of image processing, where a sequence of differently-exposed images of the same scene are combined to overcome the limited dynamic range of ordinary cameras. We extend this technique to audio. Rather than acquiring samples separated by time or space, as is done in HDR image processing, we propose to perform simultaneous sampling of the same input signal, using differently-gained versions of the same HDR signal fed into separate analog to digital convert-ers (ADCs). An HDR audio signal is thus sampled by merg-ing a set of low dynamic range (LDR) samplings of the orig-inal HDR input signal. We optimize the choice of LDR input gains to achieve as high a dynamic range as possible for a desired sampling accuracy. Index Terms — high dynamic range compositing, simul-taneous HDR compositing, composited dynamic range (CDR), HDR audio, CDR audio 1