Scalable audio coding using watermarking

A scalable audio coding method is proposed using a technique, Quantization Index Modulation, borrowed from watermarking. Some of the information of each layer output is embedded (watermarked) in the previous layer. This approach leads to a saving in bitrate while keeping the distortion almost unchanged. This makes the scalable coding system more efficient in terms of Rate-Distortion. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the scalable audio coding based on reconstruction error quantization which is used in practical systems such as MPEG-4 AAC.