Near-optimal selection of encoding parameters for audio coding

We address the issue of optimizing side information rate for efficient audio coding. In coders such as the MPEG-4 AAC, at rates around 16 kbps to 48 kbps, the side information rate forms a substantial part of the total rate. The parameter search procedure in the verification model optimizes each band separately and results in poor performance at low rates. We propose to jointly optimize the encoding parameter of all the bands. The near-optimal solution using a brute force search has drastic computational complexity. However, the same solution is obtained at a much reduced complexity using a Viterbi search through a trellis. The search procedure is developed and evaluated for two objective measures, the average and the maximum noise-mask ratio. For both the measures, the trellis-based search yields substantially better solutions. In particular, trellis-based optimization of maximum noise-mask ratio greatly improves the performance of AAC at low rates. The resulting bit stream is standard-compatible, and the additional complexity due to the proposed optimization is only incurred at the encoder