Patent ID: 8185403

Claim:
A method of decoding an audio signal, comprising: receiving a downmix signal and ancillary data including a spatial information signal, a current frame of the spatial information signal including spatial information; extracting header identification information from the ancillary data, the header identification information indicating whether the current frame of the spatial information signal includes a header; identifying the current frame including the header based on the header identification information; extracting configuration information from the header included in the current frame; and generating a multi-channel signal using the downmix signal, the configuration information and the spatial information, wherein the generating the multi-channel signal comprises: applying a parameter included in the spatial information signal to a time slot corresponding to position information of the time slot included in the spatial information signal, wherein the downmix signal is generated by downmixing the multi-channel audio signal, and the spatial information includes channel level difference indicating an energy difference between channels and inter-channel coherences meaning a correlation between channels.