Perception-based clipping of audio signals

Clipping is an essential signal processing operation in realtime audio applications. Still, existing clipping techniques introduce a considerable amount of distortion which results in a significant degradation of perceptual sound quality. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to clipping which aims to minimize perceptible clipping-induced distortion. The clipping problem is formulated as a sequence of constrained optimization problems, all of which can be solved numerically in a very efficient way. A comparative evaluation of the presented “perception-based” clipping technique and existing clipping techniques is performed using two objective measures of perceptual sound quality. For both measures, the application of the perception-based clipping technique results in consistently higher scores as compared to existing clipping techniques.