MPEG-4 High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) has adopted spectral band replication (SBR) to efficiently compress the high-frequency part of the audio. In SBR, linear prediction is applied to low-frequency subbands to suppress tonal components and smooth the associated spectra for replicating to high-frequency bands. Such a tone-suppressing process is referred to as whitening filtering. In SBR, to avoid the alias artifact incurred by spectral adjustment, a complex filterbank instead of real filterbank is adopted. For QMF subbands, this paper demonstrates that the linear prediction defined in the SBR standard results in a predictive bias. A new whitening filter, called the decimation-whitening filter, is proposed to eliminate the predictive bias and provide advantages in terms of noise-to-signal ratio measure, frequency resolution, energy leakage, and computational complexity for SBR.

This letter proposes a fast radix-$q$ algorithm to compute type-IV discrete cosine transform (DCT) of the length $q ^{\lambda}$, where $q$ is an odd positive integer. The proposed fast radix- $q$ algorithm has merits in computational complexity, parallelism, and numerical stability over existing algorithms. Furthermore, the fast radix-$q$ algorithm is used to develop the fast mixed-radix type-II/type-IV DCT algorithm for composite lengths.

Perceptual audio coding achieves a high compression ratio by exploiting the perceptual irrelevance and data redundancies. By using advanced and sophisticated signal processing methods, perceptual coding has generated artifacts that are quite different from the traditional distortions. A new audio technology becomes mature through the successful modeling, measuring, and control on the artifacts incurred from the technology. With the advance of new coding modules in advanced audio coding (AAC), spectral band replication (SBR), and parametric coding, the incurred artifacts are far more difficult to model, measure, and control than those caused by previous encoding systems like pulse code modulation. This paper models the audible artifacts through the time-frequency diagrams, considers the artifacts-susceptible music types, and analyzes the critical encoding technologies incurring these artifacts.