Efficient bit assignment strategy for perceptual audio coding

For the purpose of efficient audio coding at low rates, a new bit allocation strategy is proposed in this paper. The basic idea behind this approach is "Give bits to the band with the maximum NMR-Gain/bit" or "Retrieve bits from the band with the maximum bits/NMR-Loss". The notion of "bit-use efficiency" is suggested and it can be employed to construct a bit assignment algorithm operated at band-level as compared to the traditional frame-level bit assignment methods. Based on this strategy a new bit assignment scheme, called Max-BNLR, is designed for the MPEG-4 AAC. Simulation results show that the performance of the Max-BNLR scheme is significantly better than that of the MPEG-4 AAC Verification Model (VM) and is close to that of TB-ANMR, which is the (nearly) optimal solution. Moreover, the Max-BNLR scheme has the advantages of low computational complexity compared to TB-ANMR.