MPEG-4 Scalable to Lossless Audio Coding - Emerging International Standard for Digital Audio Compression

Abstract

Recently, with the advance of network and storage technologies, it is becoming realistic that people will enjoy high sampling rate, high resolution audio contents with lossless quality. Envisioning of such a need, the international standardization body MPEG has recently introduced a scalable tool for lossless audio coding, namely, MPEG-4 Audio Scalable to Lossless (SLS) coding. MPEG-4 SLS integrates the functionalities of lossless audio coding, perceptual audio coding, and fine granular scalable audio coding in a single framework; meanwhile it provides backward compatibility to MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) at the bit-stream level. This new tool, in combination with the existing MPEG audio toolset, provides a universal digital audio format that can be used in a variety of application domains such as professional audio, Internet music, consumer electronics, broadcasting