Auditory masking and MPEG-1 audio compression

In high-quality digital audio coding, a great deal of attention is focused on the auditory perception process, as the goal of audio compression is to attain perceptually-transparent compression and reproduction. Consequently models for perceptual masking are used extensively in audio coders, allowing quantisation noise to be allocated in the various frequency subbands according to a masking function. In this way, quantisation noise can be made almost inaudible at the receiver. In this paper, the psychoacoustic phenomenon of auditory masking is described. This is followed by a review of the MPEG-1 (Moving Pictures Experts Group) international standard for audio compression, including an outline of the psychoacoustic models used.