New results in low bitrate audio coding using a combined harmonic-wavelet representation

In this paper, we propose a new combined harmonic-wavelet representation for audio where a harmonic analysis-synthesis scheme is used, first, to approximate each audio frame as a sum of several sinusoids. Then, the difference between the original signal and the reconstructed harmonic signal is analyzed using a wavelet filtering scheme. After each step (harmonic analysis and wavelet filtering), parameters are quantized and encoded. Compared to previously proposed methods, our audio coder uses different harmonic analysis-synthesis and wavelet filtering schemes. We use the total least squares (TLS)-prony algorithm for the harmonic analysis-scheme, and an M-band wavelet transform for analyzing the residual. Altogether, our proposed coder is capable of delivering excellent audio signal quality at encoder bitrates of 60-70 kb/s.