Dynamical start-band frequency determination based on music genre for spectral band replication tool in MPEG-4 advanced audio coding

MPEG-4 high efficiency (HE) advanced audio coding (AAC) contains a useful tool called spectral band replication (SBR) to improve the coded audio quality at low bitrates. The SBR tool uses start-band frequency to determine from which frequency band replication starts. This paper describes an algorithm to dynamically determine this parameter based on the genre of the music content. The simulation results show that the proposed approach yields better objective difference grade (ODG) for coded audio than the 3GPP reference program does. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the coded audio quality of the SBR tool.