Joint filterbank structures for integrating audio coding into hearing aid applications

To help develop ultra-low power wireless hearing aid products, we investigate the integration of subband audio coding with hearing aid applications. Both the audio coding and the hearing aid application use subband processing, but their requirements for the filterbanks are totally different. The hearing aid application typically uses an oversampled filterbank to reduce the aliasing in each subband, whereas the audio codec needs a critically sampled filterbank for maximal coding efficiency. A joint filterbank structure is proposed in this paper to satisfy these contradictive filterbank requirements. With this structure, the two filterbanks are combined into a single stereo filterbank operation, which can be efficiently implemented on a filterbank coprocessor. This structure substantially reduces the computation complexity, power consumption and memory usage.