An adaptive tiling of the time-frequency plane with application to multiresolution-based perceptive audio coding

The research efforts recently devoted to the theoretical treatment of time- varying filter bank structures have created an adequate environment for the development of adaptive analysis tools, useful in many signal processing p roblems. In this paper we present a complete adaptive analysis system suita ble for the compression of audio signals; we would like to remark that our goal is not to develop a complete audio coder, just the appropriate analysi s/synthesis scheme. For basis selection, we propose a search algorithm and a new cost function based on perceptual considerations. In addition, a proc edure that determines the optimum length of the analysis segment is describ ed. Examples are given of the performance of these algorithms on some repre sentative audio signals. When the search method is compared with previous b asis selection algorithms, we find and show that, for the application of au dio compression, the perceptually driven basis selection algorithm leads to a much higher compression efficiency and better quality of the reconstruct ed signal. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.