A Multiband Excited Waveform-Interpolated 2.35-kbps Speech Codec for Bandlimited Channels

Abstract

Following a brief portrayal of the activities in 2.4-kbps speech coding, a wavelet-based pitch detector is invoked, which reduces the complexity of conventional autocorrelation-based pitch detectors, while ensuring smooth pitch trajectory evolution. This scheme is incorporated in a waveform-interpolated codec, which uses voiced–unvoiced (V/U) classification, and instead of simple Dirac pulses, an unconventional zinc basis function excitation is employed for modeling the voiced excitation. The required zinc-function parameters are determined in an analysis-by-synthesis loop, and for the sake of smooth waveform evolution and reduced complexity, a focused search strategy and a few further suboptimum restrictions are imposed without seriously affecting the speech quality. This baseline codec operates at a rate of 1.9 kbps, but it suffers from slight buzziness during the periods of excessive voicing. This impediment is then mitigated by invoking a mixed V/U multiband excitation, which slightly increases the bit rate to 2.35 kbps due to the transmission of the 3-b voicing strength code in each of the three excitation bands. Index Terms—Low-rate speech coding, multiband excitation, waveform-interpolated speech coding, wavelet-based pitch estimation.

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ORCID for L. Hanzo: orcid.org/0000-0002-2636-5214

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