Near-Perfect Reconstruction Oversampled Nonuniform Cosine-Modulated Filter Banks Based on Frequency Warping and Subband Merging

A novel method for designing near-perfect reconstruction oversampled nonuniform cosine-modulated filter banks is proposed, which combines frequency warping and subband merging, and thus offers more flexibility than known techniques. On the one hand, desirable frequency partitionings can be better approximated. On the other hand, at the price of only a small loss in partitioning accuracy, both warping strength and number of channels before merging can be adjusted so as to minimize the computational complexity of a system. In particular, the coefficient of the function behind warping can be constrained to be a negative integer power of two, so that multiplications related to allpass filtering can be replaced with more efficient binary shifts. The main idea is accompanied by some contributions to the theory of warped filter banks. Namely, group delay equalization is thoroughly investigated, and it is shown how to avoid significant aliasing by channel oversampling. Our research revolves around filter banks for perceptual processing of sound, which are required to approximate the psychoacoustic scales well and need not guarantee perfect reconstruction. Keywords—warped near-perfect reconstruction oversampled non-uniform cosine-modulated filter bank, allpass filter/transformation, subband/channel merging, frequency warping, critical bands, Bark scale.