Lossless Audio Coding using Burrows-Wheeler
Transform and Move-to-Front Coding
Hend Ali Elsayed and Masoud Alghoniemy
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Alexandria
Alexandria, 21544 Egypt
Abstract—In this paper we present a new lossless audio coder
using the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT). Audio signals
under consideration, which are assumed to be of integer values,
are first permuted using the BWT to get the transform
coefficients; and then the resulting coefficients are compressed
using a combination of the Move-to-Front coding (MTF) and an
entropy coder. Both Arithmetic and Huffman coding have been
used for entropy coding. Simulations show that the proposed
coder outperforms other lossless coders, namely, the Integer
Discrete Cosine Transform (intDCT) and the Integer Wavelet
Transform (intWT).
I. INTRODUCTION
Lossless audio coding technology is a topic of high
interest for both professional and consumer applications; such
as high definition audio, archiving systems, internet
distribution of audio files, storage, and broadband audio
streaming. This may also be useful for narrow band channels
or bad channel conditions. It is becoming realistic to deliver
high sampling rate from 44.1 to 192 KHz, high amplitude
resolution from 16 up to 32 bits per sample for lossless
coding. The specifications of the lossless audio format are
determined by the standard MPEG-4 ALS [1].
Lossless audio coding enables the compression of digital
audio without any loss in quality due to the perfect
reconstruction of the original signal, i.e., reproducing the
exact CD signal with reduced bit rate. The proposed lossless
audio coding schemes use the BWT of the input audio
stream, and then losslessly encoding the transformed
coefficients using entropy coding; such as Arithmetic and
Huffman coding or a combination of MTF coding and
entropy coding. Lossless compression can not be applied
directly to the audio signal due to the inherent inter-sample
correlation and its wide dynamic range. Hence, a
decorrelation stage, which eliminates the statistical
dependencies within the signal is necessary, which leads to
almost uncorrelated source. In this paper, the BWT is used to
perform the required decorrelation. The decoder performs the
inverse operations of the encoder in order to reconstruct the
audio stream losslessly.
Other Lossless audio coding techniques includes, the
MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coder (ALS) based on forward
adaptive linear prediction [2]. Integer transforms, namely, the
Integer Discrete Cosine Transform (intDCT) and the Integer
Wavelet Transform (intWT) [3].
II. BURROWS-WHEELER TRANSFORM
The Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is a linear
transform originally designed to improve the coherence in
text data [4]. BWT based compression algorithms were
primarily used to compress text [5], [6], and images [7]. The
BWT is a reversible block sorting transform where the
processed data is always considered in blocks. The transform
operates on a block of symbols, X, of length N to produce a
permuted data sequence, Y, of the same length and a single
integer u, 1 ≤ u ≤ N. Hence the forward transform
{Y , u} = BWT { X } (1)
And the inverse transform
{ X } = BWT ( −1){Y , u} (2)
A. Forward Burrows-Wheeler Transform
The forward BWT proceeds by forming all cyclic shifts of
the original data string and sorting those cyclic shifts
lexicographically. Since we are dealing with integer numbers,
so the corresponding alphabet will be the set of integer
numbers and lexicographic ordering will be understood as
number sorting. The BWT output has two parts. The first part
is a length N string giving the last character of each of the
(lexicographically ordered) cyclic shifts. The second part is
an integer, u, describing the location of the original data
sequence in the ordered list. An example for the BWT of the
samples X ={1, 2, 4, 6, -1, 3, 2, -4, 6, -7}is given in Table I
Considering last column and the fourth row of Table I(b),
then BWT{1, 2, 4, 6, -1, 3, 2, -4, 6, -7}= ({ 6, 2, 6, -7, 3, 1, -
1, 2, -4, 4}, 4 ).
B. Inverse Burrows-Wheeler Transform
For the BWT to be a reversible, it must be possible to
reconstruct the full table of lexicographically ordered cyclic
shifts using only the last column of the table (the BWT
output). Intuitively, this reconstruction proceeds column by
column as follows: by the table is an ordered copy of the last
column of the table. Thus, the first column reconstruction
requires only an alphabetization of the list found in the last
column. To reconstruct the second column notice that each
row is a cyclic shift of every other row, and hence that the
last and first columns together provide a list of all
consecutive pairs of symbols. Ordering this list of pairs yields
the first and second column(s) of the table. Repeating this
process on triples, quadruples, etc., sequentially reproduces
all columns of the original table. The inverse transform
mainly depends on two observations: First, the transformed
input sequence is a permutation of the original input symbols.
Second, sorting the permuted data gives the first symbol of
each of the sorted contexts. The following pseudo code
reconstructs the inverse transform table [8].
procedure IBWT table construction
1: for i ≤ N - 1 do
2: Column 3i- 2: Place column N in front of columns 1… i-1.
3: Column 3i-1: Order the resulting length i ascending.
4: Column 3i: Place the ordered list in the first i columns of
the table.
5: end for
An example of the inverse BWT can be found in [8].
TABLE I
EXAMPLE FOR FORWARD BWT
III. MOVE-TO-FRONT CODING
A MTF coder is used for preprocessing the Burrows-
Wheeler transformed sequence before it is fed to the actual
compressor. Its output is a code which refers to the position
of the symbols, thus the length of the code is the same as the
length of the symbols, N. The basic idea of the MTF scheme
is to maintain a list, which represents the symbols of the
alphabet. Frequently used symbols are located at the top of
the list. A symbol is encoded as the current index of that
symbol in the list that is as the number of symbols that
precede it in the list. Every time the symbol occurs its index
is released and the symbol is moved to the front of the list,
i.e. index 0. Both encoder and decoder should initialize the
table with the symbols in the same positions. Once a symbol
is being processed the encoder outputs its position in the table
and then puts it at the top of the table, position 0. All the
codes from position 0 till the position of the symbol being
coded are moved to the next position. This simple scheme
assigns codes with low values to highly redundant symbols.
As an example, consider finding the MTF code for the BWT
sequence Y = {6, 2, 6, -7, 3, 1, - 1, 2, -4, 4} . Let the set of
alphabet composing Y be α = {-7, -1, -4, -1, 1, 2, 4, 6}. Table
II(a) illustrates the coding process which reveals the MTF
code as Z ={7, 5, 1, 2, 6, 6, 6, 5, 6, 7} . In order to decode the
sequence Z, just perform another MTF coding to Z, i.e., Y =
MTF (Z). The decoding process illustrated by Table II (b) [9].
TABLE II
MTF CODING EXAMPLE
IV. SIMULATION
Various audio signals with 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz sampling
rates have been used to simulate the proposed coder. In
particular, six audio signals Sig1, Sig2, Sig3, Sig4, Sig5 and
Sig6 each of length 2.32 sec, sampled at 44.1 and 48 KHz
sampling rate with 16 bits unsigned integers have been
considered in the simulation. Audio signals are divided into
frames each of length 23.2 msec. For comparison, after
applying the forward BWT, two schemes have been
considered:
• Scheme 1: Applying lossless coding without MTF
coding.
• Scheme 2: Applying lossless coding with MTF
coding.
Lossless coding is implemented using Arithmetic and
Huffman coding and compared to the entropy of the signal.
Different sampling rates and frame sizes have been
considered as well.
Fig. 1(a) and Fig. 1(b) show the output bit rate in bps for
various audio signals and the average bit rates using scheme 1
and scheme 2, respectively, for 44.1 kHz sampling rate and a
frame length of 23.2 msec. Similarly, Fig 2(a) and Fig 2(b)
illustrate similar results for sampling rate of 48 kHz. As it is
clear from the figures, scheme 2 lower bit rates than scheme 1
and hence better compression due to MTF coding.
On the other hand, Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 show the average bit
rate using scheme 2 for different sampling rates and frame
lengths, respectively. Finally, Fig. 5 gives a comparison
between the proposed coding schemes and the Integer
Discrete Cosine Transform (intDCT) and the Integer Wavelet
Transform (intWT), from which we can see the achieved
improvement over the other schemes [3].

Fig. 1. Bit Rates for Fs= 44.1 kHz

Fig. 2. Bit Rates for Fs = 48 kHz
 V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented a new lossless audio coding
scheme using Burrows-Wheeler transform and the Move-to-
Front coding. We have showed the dependence of the bit rate
on the entropy coding methods (Huffman and Arithmetic
coding), frame length, and sampling rate. Simulation results
show the improvement achieved by using the combined MTF
coding and the BWT over the intDCT and the intWT.
REFERENCES
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[9] [Available Online] http://www.arturocampos.com/ac_mtf.html.

Fig. 4. Unnormalized average bit rate using scheme 2 for different frame
lengths

Fig. 5. Bit Rates for various lossless coding schemes, Fs=44.1 kHz