High performance CELP coder utilizing a novel adaptive forward-backward LPC quantization

Abstract

A highly efficient algorithm termed adaptive forward-backward vector quantization (AFBVQ) is developed for variable bit rate quantization of linear predictive coding (LPC) coefficients and integrated with the FS1016 Federal Standard Code Excited Linear Predictive (CELP) coder. This results in a high performance low bit rate speech coder called as AFBVQ-CELP which brings in two-fold bit rate reduction by backward LPC indexing and by forward LPC VQ. In AFBVQ, a previously decoded and temporally close speech signal is re-segmented into overlapping blocks. As the LPC coefficients calculated from one of those synthetic blocks are spectrally close to the current unquantized LPC coefficients, the backward LPC indexing is used to encode the current speech block; otherwise, the forward linear prediction is practised with the split vector quantization supported by a very efficient codebook initialization termed Mixture Gaussian Clustering (MGC). When compared to FS1016 CELP coder, AFBVQ-CELP reduces the LPC bit rate by 18 bit-per-frame (bpf) at the same spectral distortion. It means the overall bit rate is reduced from 4.8 kbps (FS1016 CELP) to 4.2 kbps. Furthermore, the proposed AFBVQ consistently outperforms the traditional forward LPC VQ by 3 bpf with the same spectral distortion. Subjective listening tests show that with AFBVQ-CELP the LPC bit rate can be further reduced to 8.4 bpf, resulting in 3.94 kbps overall bit rate without compromising the decoded speech quality.