Perceptual Audio Coding: A 40-Year Historical Perspective
Audio and Speech Processing
2025-04-24 v1
Abstract
In the history of audio and acoustic signal processing, perceptual audio coding has certainly excelled as a bright success story by its ubiquitous deployment in virtually all digital media devices, such as computers, tablets, mobile phones, set-top-boxes, and digital radios. From a technology perspective, perceptual audio coding has undergone tremendous development from the first very basic perceptually driven coders (including the popular mp3 format) to today's full-blown integrated coding/rendering systems. This paper provides a historical overview of this research journey by pinpointing the pivotal development steps in the evolution of perceptual audio coding. Finally, it provides thoughts about future directions in this area.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.16223,
title = {Perceptual Audio Coding: A 40-Year Historical Perspective},
author = {Jürgen Herre and Schuyler Quackenbush and Minje Kim and Jan Skoglund},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.16223},
year = {2025}
}