Pitch sharpening for perceptually improved CELP, and the sparse-delta codebook for reduced computation

Abstract

The authors introduce two techniques for improving low-bit-rate CELP (code excited linear prediction) speech coders. The sparse-delta stochastic codebook is a recursive codebook design which can be searched using roughly 5% of the computational load required to search a full Gaussian codebook. Pitch sharpening is a class of algorithms which attempt to improve the perceptual quality of CELP by limiting the feedback of low-amplitude noiselike information to the adaptive codebook. Simulation results are presented for sparse-delta, ternary sparse-delta, and simplified-search sparse-delta coders, and for reduced-gain and sparse-adaptive-codebook pitch sharpening algorithms. >