Audio Signal Processing and Coding

5.6 PERCEPTUAL ENTROPY

Johnston [John88a] combined notions of psychoacoustic masking with signal quantization principles to define perceptual entropy (PE), a measure of perceptually relevant information contained in any audio record. Expressed in bits per sample, PE represents a theoretical limit on the compressibility of a particular signal. PE measurements reported in [John88a] and [John88b] suggest that a wide variety of CD-quality audio source material can be transparently compressed at approximately 2.1 bits per sample. The PE estimation process is accomplished as follows. The signal is first windowed and transformed to the frequency domain. A masking threshold is then obtained using perceptual rules. Finally, a determination is made of the number of bits required to quantize the spectrum without injecting perceptible noise. The PE measurement is obtained by constructing a PE histogram over many frames and then choosing a worst-case value as the actual measurement.

The frequency-domain transformation is done with a Hann window followed by a 2048-point fast Fourier transform (FFT). Masking thresholds are obtained by performing critical band analysis (with spreading), making a determination of the noise-like or tone-like nature of the signal, applying thresholding rules for the signal quality, then accounting for the absolute hearing threshold. First, real and imaginary transform components are converted to power spectral components

then a discrete Bark spectrum is formed by ...