A fast bit allocation method for MPEG layer III

The MPEG/audio layer III has been widely used to store the CD-quality music sequences. The layer III is an asymmetric codec in the sense that the complexity of the audio encoder is much higher than that of the decoder. A key task leading to the higher complexity is the bit allocation. The MPEG/audio layer III encoder has adopted schemes such as nonuniform quantization and Huffman coding to achieve high coding efficiency. However, all these schemes do not have the problem in quality and bit-rate controls. The usual method follows an iterative approach to perform bit allocation to achieve both quality and bit rate tuning. This method has immense complexity and will sacrifice the quality to fit bit rate. This paper presents an efficient allocation method, which has merits in both complexity and quality control.