A modified distortion metric for audio coding

Current audio coding standards employ the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) where overlapped frames of audio are windowed and transformed to the frequency domain. Encoding parameters are chosen so as to minimize a distortion measure subject to a rate constraint. At the decoder, inverse transformation involves additional windowing and overlap-add of frames. An analysis of the time domain error in the reconstructed frame reveals that distortion metrics based solely on the MDCT domain error are in fact unable to capture the effects of windowing and overlap-add at the decoder. The main contribution of this paper is a modified distortion metric that does capture these effects via modified discrete sine transform analysis. When incorporated into an Advanced Audio Coder the proposed distortion metric significantly improves subjective quality of reconstructed audio.