Cascaded RLS–LMS Prediction in MPEG-4 Lossless Audio Coding

This paper describes the cascaded recursive least square-least mean square (RLS-LMS) prediction, which is part of the recently published MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coding international standard. The predictor consists of cascaded stages of simple linear predictors, with the prediction error at the output of one stage passed to the next stage as the input signal. A linear combiner adds up the intermediate estimates at the output of each prediction stage to give a final estimate of the RLS-LMS predictor. In the RLS-LMS predictor, the first prediction stage is a simple first-order predictor with a fixed coefficient value 1. The second prediction stage uses the recursive least square algorithm to adaptively update the predictor coefficients. The subsequent prediction stages use the normalized least mean square algorithm to update the predictor coefficients. The coefficients of the linear combiner are then updated using the sign-sign least mean square algorithm. For stereo audio signals, the RLS-LMS predictor uses both intrachannel prediction and interchannel prediction, which results in a 3% improvement in compression ratio over using only the intrachannel prediction. Through extensive tests, the MPEG-4 Audio Lossless coder using the RLS-LMS predictor has demonstrated a compression ratio that is on par with the best lossless audio coders in the field. In this paper, the structure of the RLS-LMS predictor is described in detail, and the optimal predictor configuration is studied through various experiments.