Noiseless coding of quantized spectral components in MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), part of ISO/MPEG-2, issued as an international standard in April, 1997. It supports single or multiple channel audio programs and delivers excellent audio quality at or below 64 kbps/channel by exploiting the compression capabilities of a high-resolution filterbank, backward-adaptive prediction, joint channel coding, nonlinear quantizers and noiseless (Huffman) coding. This paper describes the flexible Huffman coding algorithm used in AAC and discusses the compression provided by this component of the standard.