Psychoacoustic Models for Perceptual Audio Coding—A Tutorial Review

Abstract

Psychoacoustic models of human auditory perception have found an important application in the realm of perceptual audio coding, where exploiting the limitations of perception and removal of irrelevance is key to achieving a significant reduction in bitrate while preserving subjective audio quality. To this end, psychoacoustic models do not need to be perfect to satisfy their purpose, and in fact the commonly employed models only represent a small subset of the known properties and abilities of the human auditory system. This paper provides a tutorial introduction of the most commonly used psychoacoustic models for low bitrate perceptual audio coding.

Keywords

• psychoacoustic model
• perceptual model
• masking
• low bitrate audio coding
• perceptual audio coding