A new forward masking model and its application to perceptual audio coding

This paper presents a new forward masking model for perceptual audio coding. This model exploits adaptation of the peripheral sensory and neural elements in the auditory system, which is often deemed as the cause of forward masking. Nonlinearity of the ear is modeled by a nonlinear analog circuit with difference equations. We incorporate this model in the MPEG layer III audio coding scheme and construct a masking plane in the frequency-time space. With some extra computations, the new audio coding scheme can improve the sound quality of the decoded audio signals. In our experiments, subjective and objective sound quality measurements show that, to achieve the same reconstructed sound quality, the new scheme requires 12% to 23% less bits than the original MPEG layer III scheme.