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Optimized Huffman Decoding for AAC

In today's competitive consumer audio market the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format has quickly become a must-have technology with its adoption on the Internet, in digital radio, digital television and home theatre. Compression using AAC retains high audio quality even at low bit rates. One reason for this effectiveness is the use of Huffinan variable length coding to represent frequency domain information. However, this requires to perform the relatively complex task of Huffman decoding in the audio decoder, which is typically very sensitive to cost and processor speed requirements. Furthermore, encoders can sometimes create worst-case scenarios consisting of very long code words, even when unnecessary. Thus, one needs to optimize the Huffinan decoding for these worst-case scenarios without giving up average performance. This paper discusses various methods for Huffinan decoding, their inherent implementation tradeoffs on a DSP platform and proposes improvements that are specific to the Huffman codebooks used in AAC.

Authors: Mesarovic, Vladimir; Rao, Raghunath; Dokic, Miroslav; Deo, Sachin
Affiliation: Cirrus Logic Inc, Austin, TX
AES Conference:UK 16th Conference: Silicon for Audio (April 2001)
Paper Number:uk117 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Silicon for Audio

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