Bandwidth Extension of Speech Signals Using Quadrature Mirror Filter (QMF)

Abstract

Telephone networks normally transmit narrowband (NB) speech with a bandwidth restricted to 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz. While human speech comprises frequencies even further than the NB, there is a degradation of speech quality and intelligibility in such networks. This can be enhanced by recovering the speech components existing beyond the telephone bandwidth using Quadrature Mirror Filter (QMF) to give a perceptually superior wideband (WB) speech signal. QMF banks utilized as the fundamental mathematical tools to analyze and synthesize speech signals to coding of speech signal in sub-bands. Utilization of QMF's allows evading the aliasing effects due to samples decimation when signal is divide into sub-bands. In this paper, the performance of bandwidth extension (BWE) of speech through QMF was assessed by objective parameters like Log Spectral Distortion (LSD) and Itakura-Saito distance (ISD) and subjective parameters like Mean opinion score (MOS), Absolute Category Rating (ACR), Comparison Category Rating (CCR) and Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) which demonstrates that the recovered WB speech signal provides speech quality compared by original WB speech signal.