Improved MPEG-4 high-efficiency AAC with variable-length soft-decision decoding of the quantized spectral coefficients

MPEG-4 High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is designed for low bit rate applications, such as audio streaming in mobile communications. The HE-AAC audio codec offers a better coding efficiency since variable-length codes (VLCs) are adopted. However, HE-AAC has originally been designed for storage and error-free transmission conditions. For the transmission over bit error-prone channels, error propagation is a serious problem for the VLCs. Therefore, a robust HE-AAC decoder is desired, especially for mobile communications. In contrast to traditional hard-decision decoding, utilizing bit-wise channel reliability information, soft-decision (SD) decoding has been known to offer better audio quality. In HE-AAC, the global gain parameter is coded with fixed-length codes (FLCs), while the scale factors and quantized spectral coefficients are coded with VLCs. In this work, we apply FL/SD decoding to the global gain parameter, VL/SD decoding to the parameters scale factors and quantized spectral coefficients. Especially, in order to apply VL/SD decoding to the quantized spectral coefficients, a new modified trellis representation in VL/SD decoding is proposed. An improved HE-AAC performance is clearly observed, with the support of both instrumental measurements and a subjective listening test.