This paper proposes a new method for designing nonuniform filter banks (NUFBs) with perfectreconstruction (PR) and linear-phase (LP) properties. It is based on the recombination structure, where the outputs of the analysis filters in a uniform original filter bank (FB)
INTRODUCTIONThe theory and design of nonuniform filter banks (NUFBs) have received considerable attention due to their flexibility in subband partitioning and processing. In applications where phase distortion is an important concern, filter banks with linear-phase (LP) analysis and synthesis are highly desirable. For example, in image processing, LP filter banks (FBs) are frequently employed to avoid possible phase distortion. Among the various methods for designing NUFBs, only a few are applicable to the design of NUFBs satisfying the LP property [1][2][3], [6]. The tree-structure FB is a simple method for realizing PR LP NUFBs, but the choice of the decimation factors is usually limited and the system delay is rather long due to the cascade nature of the tree structure. Another class of design method is based on the direct structure in [1][2][3], where the analysis filters are designed directly [1] or by mean of iterative optimization algorithm. In channel number in order to generate subbands with different decimation factors. The advantage of the RNUFB is that the PR property is structurally imposed as long as the original uniform FB and the recombination FBs are PR. In [5,17] the theory and design of PR cosine-modulated RNUFBs are studied in detail. Due to large number of design variables and hence complexity associated with a general NUFB, even LP FBs are difficult to design in practice. The use of cosine modulatd FBs (CMFBs) greatly reduces the number of design variables and complexity. Consequently, high quality PR RNUFBs can be obtained. In [6], the design of linear phase RNUFBs is considered where a matching condition for orthogonal PR FBs was derived. However, due to the difficulties in designing LP original and recombination FBs with large number of channels, the RNUFBs so obtained are nearly PR.We note that the key difficulty in obtaining LP RNUFBs hinges on a design of the original and recombination PR LP FBs in the recombination structure. Among the existing methods for designing M-channel PR LP uniform FBs [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15], the modulation-based approach is probably the simplest to apply [7][8][9]. However, the frequency support of these FBs is considerably different from that of uniform FBs. Therefore, it may not be suitable in RNUFBs. The lattice structure is another popular method for designing PR LP FBs, since the PR and linear phase property can be structural imposed [10][11][12][13][14]. Unfortunately, the frequency response becomes a very nonlinear function of a large number of lattice parameter, making the design very complicated and somewhat difficult to obtain good results as the filter length increases. In [15], a direct method for designing M-channel PR LP uniform FBs was proposed. By choosing...