Hybrid LPC and Discrete Wavelet Transform audio coding with a novel bit allocation algorithm

This paper examines a new method for coding high quality digital audio signals based on a combination of Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) and the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). In this method, a linear predictor is first used to model each audio frame. Then, the prediction error is analyzed using the DWT. The LPC coefficients and DWT coefficients are quantized using a novel bit allocation scheme which minimizes the overall quantization error with respect to the masking threshold. The proposed coder is capable of delivering near-transparent audio signal quality at encoding bitrates of around 90-96 kb/s. Objective and subjective results suggest that the proposed coder operating at 90-96 kb/s has a performance comparable to that of the MPEG layer II codec operating at 128 kb/s.