A new audio coder using a warped linear prediction model and the wavelet transform

In this paper, we present results for a wavelet transform (WT) excited warped linear prediction (WLP) audio coder. In contrast to conventional LP, WLP allows for the control of frequency resolution to closely match the response of the human auditory system. The structure of the system is similar to the transform-coded excitation techniques used in wideband speech coding, where LP has been replaced with WLP. Quantisation of the wavelet coefficients is aided by a psychoacoustic model to minimise the perceptually significant noise due to quantisation error. For monophonic signals sampled at 44.1 kHz, the coder achieves near transparent quality for a variety of speech and music signals at an average bit-rate of 64 kb/s. When compared to MPEG layer III at the same bit-rate, the coder delivers superior quality. The power of the proposed coder resides in its easy scalability to lower bitrates.