Patent ID: 8032371

Claim:
A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium storing instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, cause: estimating a cost of selecting a particular scale factor value to quantize data that represents a portion of digital media; wherein the estimation is based, at least in part, on an estimated level of quality of media that would be produced by quantizing said data using the particular scale factor value; and using a quality estimation function, at least a portion of which is non-linear, to determine said estimated level of quality; wherein at least one input to said quality estimation function is a noise-to-mask ratio; wherein said quality estimation function includes an expression and a constant that is an exponent of the expression, wherein the expression includes the noise-to-mask ratio; wherein said portion of said quality estimation function is expressed as Q =1−(1−L) −R ; wherein L is the noise-to-mask ratio, R is a constant, and Q is an estimated level of quality based on a value of L and a value of R.