Patent ID: 7987008

Claim:
A method of decoding an audio signal by a decoder operated by a central processing unit, the method comprising: receiving, by the decoder, the audio signal including at least one block of audio data and configuration information; reading, by the decoder, coding type information from the configuration information, the coding type information indicating a Block Gilbert Moore Code (BGMC) scheme used in encoding the audio signal; reading, by the decoder, partitioning information from the configuration information, the partitioning information indicating a sub-block partitioning scheme, partitioning, by the decoder, at least one block of the audio data into sub-blocks based on the sub-block partitioning scheme; and decoding, by the decoder, the sub-blocks based on the entropy coding scheme and a number of the sub-blocks if the block is divided into sub-blocks, wherein an entropy coding scheme is one of a Rice code scheme and the BGMC scheme, and if the entropy coding scheme is the BGMC scheme, the sub-block partitioning scheme is one of (i) a first partition scheme providing for selecting between no partitioning and partitioning the block into four sub-blocks, and (ii) a second partition scheme providing for selecting between no partitioning, partitioning the block into two sub-blocks, partitioning the block into four sub-blocks and partitioning the block into eight sub-blocks, wherein the number of sub-blocks is determined based on the entropy coding scheme and the sub-block partitioning scheme.