Union of MDCT Bases for Audio Coding

This paper investigates the use of sparse overcomplete decompositions for audio coding. Audio signals are decomposed over a redundant union of modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) bases having eight different scales. This approach produces a sparser decomposition than the traditional MDCT-based orthogonal transform and allows better coding efficiency at low bitrates. Contrary to state-of-the-art low bitrate coders, which are based on pure parametric or hybrid representations, our approach is able to provide transparency. Moreover, we use a bitplane encoding approach, which provides a fine-grain scalable coder that can seamlessly operate from very low bitrates up to transparency. Objective evaluation, as well as listening tests, show that the performance of our coder is significantly better than a state-of-the-art transform coder at very low bitrates and has similar performance at high bitrates. We provide a link to test soundfiles and source code to allow better evaluation and reproducibility of the results.