Efficient stereo bitrate allocation for fully scalable audio codec

The bit allocation algorithm for stereo channels in MPEG-4 scalable lossless coding (SLS) is not optimized. A perceptually enhanced stereo bit allocation algorithm for fully scalable audio coding is presented in this paper. According to the energy distribution in different channels, the bitrate is allocated in a much more efficient manner. Experiment results show that the proposed method significantly improves the perceptual quality of the fully scalable audio at various bitrates without introducing any new side information.