Rate-distortion allocation for time-frequency dependent audio coding

A stream coding framework is presented for solving the distortion-constrained time-frequency dependent quantization problem that naturally arises when overlapped time-frequency decompositions are used. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) an efficient rate-distortion allocation algorithm for dependent quantization when the neighborhood of dependency is large; and (2) demonstration that a perceptual excitation distortion measure produces better coded audio quality than the conventional noise-to-mask ratio measure.