The symmetric extension method has recently been shown to be an efficient way for subband processing of finite-length sequences. This paper presents an extension of this method to general linear-phase perfect-reconstruction filter banks. We derive constraints on the length and symmetry polarity of the permissible filter banks and propose a new design algorithm. In the algorithm, different symmetric sequences are formulated in a unified form based on the circular-symmetry framework. The length constraints in symmetrically extending the input sequence and windowing the subband sequences are investigated. The effect of shifting the input sequence is included. When the algorithm is applied to equal-length filter banks, we explicitly show that symmetric extension methods can always be constructed to replace the circular convolution approach.published_or_final_versio
