High-quality audio compression using an adaptive wavelet packet decomposition and psychoacoustic modeling

Abstract

This paper presents a technique to incorporate psychoacoustic models into an adaptive wavelet packet scheme to achieve perceptually transparent compression of high-quality (34.1 kHz) audio signals at about 45 kb/s. The filter bank structure adapts according to psychoacoustic criteria and according to the computational complexity that is available at the decoder. This permits software implementations that can perform according to the computational power available in order to achieve real time coding/decoding. The bit allocation scheme is an adapted zero-tree algorithm that also takes input from the psychoacoustic model. The measure of performance is a quantity called subband perceptual rate, which the filter bank structure adapts to approach the perceptual entropy (PE) as closely as possible. In addition, this method is also amenable to progressive transmission, that is, it can achieve the best quality of reconstruction possible considering the size of the bit stream available at the encoder. The result is a variable-rate compression scheme for high-quality audio that takes into account the allowed computational complexity, the available bit-budget, and the psychoacoustic criteria for transparent coding. This paper thus provides a novel scheme to marry the results in wavelet packets and perceptual coding to construct an algorithm that is well suited to high-quality audio transfer for Internet and storage applications.