Lossless scalable audio coder and quality enhancement

Abstract

This paper proposes a lossless scalable audio coding scheme and quality enhancement processing at the decoder to compensate for some missing scalable units of information. The bit rate scalability is achieved by combining high-compression coding, such as MPEG-4, and horizontal bit slicing of the PCM-coded error signal between the original waveform and the locally reconstructed MPEG-4 signal. The horizontally sliced stream may be transported through an IP network with priority. Even if some units are missing at the decoder, reasonable quality waveform can be reconstructed by means of post-processing using some side information. This scheme enables graceful degradation by supporting lossless, near lossless, and high-compression coding within a single scalable framework, and is useful for narrowband to broadband audio streaming.