Patent ID: 8046234

Claim:
A coding method comprising: using at least one processor for: inputting audio signal and extracting audio data from said audio signal; slicing the audio data so that sliced audio data corresponds to a plurality of layers; obtaining scale band information defining a scale factor for each of a plurality of scale frequency bands and coding band information defining a coding model for a plurality of coding frequency bands, the scale frequency bands and coding frequency bands corresponding to each of the plurality of layers; coding additional information containing scale factor information and coding model information based on scale band information and coding band information corresponding to a first layer; obtaining quantized samples by quantizing audio data corresponding to the first layer with reference to the scale factor information; Huffman-coding the obtained plurality of quantized samples in units of symbols in order from a symbol formed with most significant bits (MSB) down to a symbol formed with least significant bits (LSB) by referring to the coding model information; and repeatedly performing the steps with increasing the ordinal number of the layer one by one every time, until coding for the plurality of layers is finished, wherein the Huffman-coding of the plurality of the quantized samples comprises: mapping a plurality of K quantized samples on a bit plane where K is an integer; and coding the K quantized samples in units of K-bit sized symbols in consideration of a bit range allowed in each of the plurality of layers corresponding to the samples in order from a symbol formed with MSB bits down to a symbol formed with LSB bits by obtaining a scalar value corresponding to the symbol, and performing Huffman-coding by referring to the K-bit binary data, the obtained scalar value, and a scalar value corresponding to a symbol higher than a current symbol on the bit plane.