A progressive approach for perceptual audio coding

A progressive approach to perceptual audio coding is presented in this paper. In contrast with existing perceptual audio coding schemes where the digital audio signal is encoded at a fixed bit rate, the progressive approach achieves fully embedded audio coding whose bit rate can be controlled dynamically, making it useful in audio networking applications. In the proposed scheme, efficient successive quantization and bit layer coding are applied for the compression of an audio signal representation obtained from traditional subband decomposition. An improved successive approximation quantization (ISAQ) is introduced to perform bit allocation and quantization based on the psychoacoustic analysis of input audio signals.