From lossy to lossless audio coding using SPIHT

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a scalable audio compression scheme that scales up from lossy to lossless compression. Scalable audio compression has been of interest in the audio compression community for some time, with the most obvious attempt at obtaining a solution coming in the form of the MPEG-4 standard [1]. At the same time the increase in bit rates in both mobile communications [2] and the internet’s broadband technology means that audio compression algorithms with higher bit rates than currently used, such as MPEG’s mp3 [1], can be employed to obtain higher quality. However, the new increased data rates are not necessarily constant, this is especially the case when considering the internet. As such, scalable schemes that can scale to lossless compression have become rather interesting from an application point of view. The scheme presented in this paper achieves lossless compression that is comparable with the state of the art whilst maintaining a scalable embedded bitstream.