A new bitplane coder for scalable transform audio coding

This paper proposes a new bit plane coding method for signed integer sequences. This method consists in mapping successive bit planes onto quinary symbols (+, “, 0, 1, EoP), where the symbol “EoP” stands for “End of Plane”, and applying arithmetic coding. Sign bits are efficiently coded in combination with the corresponding most significant bit of non-zero integers. Moreover, bit planes are scanned and coded in a non-sequential manner to exploit the correlation between successive planes. Results for conversational transform coding of wideband speech and audio signals - sampled at 16 kHz - show that the performance/complexity of the proposed bitplane coder is near equivalent to non-embedded coding (stack-run coding), while offering additional flexibility (bitstream scalability).