Low bit-rate audio coder using an M-band multiresolution filter bank

A new audio coding system is proposed. Using an M-band multiresolution filter bank technique. This consists of a cascade of 4-band and 8-band filter banks. Experiments with a complete audio coding system were carried out with the proposed filter bank, masking model, bit allocation algorithm, scalar quantisation and Huffman coding. For the broadband signals tested, the proposed system resulted in near transparent quality at bit-rates of 78-91 kbit/s with low computational load. It also achieved similar performance to the MPEG layer 2 coder at 128 kbit/s