Lossless scalable audio coding and quality enhancement

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 preserving the important packets. In addition, quality enhancement procedures including scale adjustment and post-processing have been proposed. The scale adjustment eliminates unnecessary zero's, and the post-processing recovers the spectral envelope characteristics of the original input signal. As a result of objective quality evaluation, the two techniques are confirmed to be useful for quality enhancement when lower priority packets are lost. 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.