AES E-Library

An Experimental Audio Coder using Rate-distortion Controlled Temporal Block Switching

To address the requirement of piecewise stationarity within the analyzed signal segments, today’s state of the art audio codecs make use of two filter bank resolutions. Short temporal resolution sequences are used to adapt to transient like jump signals, long temporal resolutions are used to effectively code the more steady or slowly drifting waveforms. With increasing computational capacity a better adaptation of the filter bank to the signal becomes feasible. The paper presents an experimental MDCT based transform coder which is capable of switching between four filter bank resolutions. A distortion measure is deployed which is driven by a simple psychoacoustic model that incorporates masking effects both for stationary and transient signals. A rate-distortion control is proposed to partition the signal to optimally match the signal contour with the temporal resolutions of the filter bank. Performance results are presented and compared to the conventional two resolution approach. Proposals for further developments, like pre-segmentation are evaluated.

Authors: Boehm, Johannes; Jax, Peter; Kordon, Sven
Affiliations: THOMSON; THOMSON, Research & Innovation, Audio Processing Lab Hannover(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention:120 (May 2006) Paper Number:6810 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Low Bit-Rate Audio Coding

Click to purchase paper or login as an AES member. If your company or school subscribes to the E-Library then switch to the institutional version. If you are not an AES member and would like to subscribe to the E-Library then Join the AES!

This paper costs $20 for non-members, $5 for AES members and is free for E-Library subscribers.

Learn more about the AES E-Library

E-Library Location: (CD 120Papers)   /120/6810.pdf

Start a discussion about this paper!