Patent ID: 7272566

Claim:
A method for reducing the total bit cost of a perceptual audio encoder employing adaptive bit allocation in which an audio signal is received; a time domain representation of the audio signal is divided into successive time blocks, each time block is divided into frequency bands, and a scale factor is assigned to each of ones of the frequency bands, wherein the number of bits required to represent each block increases with increases in the scale factor values and with increases in band-to-band variations in scale factor values, comprising determining a preliminary scale factor for said each of ones of the frequency bands, optimizing the scale factor for said each of ones of the frequency bands, said optimizing including increasing the scale factor to a value greater than the preliminary scale factor value for one or more of the frequency bands such that the increase in bit cost of said increasing is the same or less than the reduction in bit cost resulting from the decrease in band-to-band variations in scale factor values resulting from increasing the scale factor for one or more of the frequency bands, and using the optimized scale factors to encode said audio signal.