Patent ID: 8446947

Claim:
A method for encoding a digital signal into a scalable bitstream comprising: quantizing the digital signal, and encoding the quantized signal to form a core-layer bitstream; performing an error mapping based on the digital signal and the core-layer bitstream to remove information that has been encoded into the core-layer bitstream, resulting in an error signal; bitplane coding the error signal based on perceptual information of the digital signal, resulting in an enhancement-layer bitstream, wherein the perceptual information of the digital signal is determined using a perceptual model; multiplexing the core-layer bitstream and the enhancement-layer bitstream, thereby generating the scalable bitstream; wherein the error signal is represented in bitplanes comprising a plurality of bitplane symbols, and wherein the bitplanes are shifted based on the perceptual information of the digital signal, such that bitplanes which are more perceptually important are coded first when the bitplanes are scanned and coded in a consecutive sequence during bitplane coding of the error signal; wherein at least one of the following information is determined as the perceptual information of the digital signal by the perceptual model; and for each frequency band s of a plurality of frequency bands, the maximum bit-plane M(s) that contains a non-zero bit-plane symbol for the frequency band s of the error signal.