METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ENCODING AND DECODING AN AUDIO SIGNAL USING ADAPTIVELY SWITCHED TEMPORAL RESOLUTION IN THE SPECTRAL DOMAIN

Perceptual audio codecs make use of filter banks and MDCT in order to achieve a compact representation of the audio signal, by removing redundancy and irrelevancy from the original audio signal. During quasi-stationary parts of the audio signal a high frequency resolution of the filter bank is advantageous in order to achieve a high coding gain, but this high frequency resolution is coupled to a coarse temporal resolution that becomes a problem during transient signal parts by producing audible pre-echo effects. The invention achieves improved coding/decoding quality by applying on top of the output of a first filter bank a second non-uniform filter bank, i.e. a cascaded MDCT. The inventive codec uses switching to an additional extension filter bank (or multi-resolution filter bank) in order to re-group the time-frequency representation during transient or fast changing audio signal sections. By applying a corresponding switching control, pre-echo effects are avoided and a high coding gain and a low coding delay are achieved.