Trellis-Based Approaches to Rate-Distortion Optimized Audio Encoding

Many important audio coding applications, such as streaming and playback of stored audio, involve offline compression. In such scenarios, encoding delays no longer represent a major concern. Despite this fact, most current audio encoders constrain delay by making encoding decisions on a per frame basis. This paper is concerned with delayed-decision approaches to optimize the encoding operation for the entire audio file. Trellis-based dynamic programming is used for efficient search in the parameter space. A two-layered trellis effectively optimizes the choice of quantization and coding parameters within a frame, as well as window decisions and bit distribution across frames, while minimizing a psychoacoustically relevant distortion measure under a prescribed bit-rate constraint. The bitstream thus produced is standard compatible and there is no additional decoding delay. Objective and subjective results indicate substantial gains over the reference encoder.