We develop a new approach for the design of two-channel perfect reconstruction (PR) filter banks that yield low system delay. The proposed design procedure is based on the ideaa of starting with trivial initial filters that yield low delay and satisfy the PR property. The lengths of the filters are subsequently increased in order to obtain filters with good magnitude response without sacrificing the low-delay or the PR properties of the filter bank. This is accomplished by increasing the length of the filters such that an appropriate cost function is minimized. We also develop an optimization technique to find a local minimum of the cost function.