Using Salient Envelope Features for Audio Coding

In this paper, we present a perceptual audio coding method that encodes the audio using perceptually salient envelope features. These features are found by passing the audio through a set of gammatone filters, and then computing the Hilbert envelopes of the responses. Relevant points of these envelopes are isolated and transmitted to the decoder. The decoder reconstructs the audio in an iterative manner from these relevant envelope points. Initial experiments suggest that even without sophisticated entropy coding a moderate bitrate reduction is possible while retaining good quality.