Low Delay Filterbanks for Enhanced Low Delay Audio Coding

Low delay perceptual audio coding has recently gained wide acceptance for high quality communication. While common schemes are based on the well-known Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT) filterbank, this paper describes novel coding algorithms that, for the first time, make use of dedicated low delay filterbanks, thus achieving improved coding efficiency while maintaining or even reducing the low codec delay. The MPEG-4 Enhanced Low Delay AAC (AAC-ELD) coder currently under development within ISO/MPEG combines a traditional perceptual audio coding scheme with spectral band replication (SBR), both running in a delay-optimized fashion by using low delay filterbanks.