Abstract
Recently the MPEG Audio standardization group has successfully concluded the standardization process on technology for lossless coding of audio signals. A summary of the scalable lossless coding (SLS) technology as one of the results of this standardization work is given. MPEG-4 scalable lossless coding provides a fine-grain scalable lossless extension of the well-known MPEG-4 AAC perceptual audio coder up to fully lossless reconstruction at word lengths and sampling rates typically used for high-resolution audio. The underlying innovative technology is described in detail and its performance is characterized for lossless and near lossless representation, both in conjunction with an AAC coder and as a stand-alone compression engine. A number of application scenarios for the new technology are discussed.