Coding of Excitation Signals In a Waveform Interpolation Speech Coder

The goal of this thesis is to improve the quality of the Waveform Interpolation (WI) coded speech at 4.25 kbps. The quality improvement is focused on the efficient coding scheme of voiced speech segments, while keeping the basic coding format intact. In the WI paradigm voiced speech is modelled as a concatenation of the Slowly Evolving pitch-cycle Waveforms (SEW). Vector quantization is the optimal approach to encode the SEW magnitude at low bit rates, but its complexity imposes a formidable barrier. Product code vector quantizers (PC-VQ) are a family of structured VQs that circumvent the complexity obstacle. The performance of product code VQs can be traded off against their storage and encoding complexity. This thesis introduces split/shape-gain VQ—a hybrid product code VQ, as an approach to quantize the SEW magnitude. The amplitude spectrum of the SEW is split into three non-overlapping subbands. The gains of the three subbands form the gain vector which are quantized using the conventional Generalized Lloyd Algorithm (GLA). Each shape vector obtained by normalizing each subband by its corresponding coded gain is quantized using a dimension conversion VQ along with a perceptually based bit allocation strategy and a perceptually weighted distortion measure. At the receiver, the discontinuity of the gain contour at the boundary of subbands introduces buzziness in the reconstructed speech. This problem is tackled by smoothing the gain versus frequency contour using a piecewise monotonic cubic interpolant. Simulation results indicate that the new method improves speech quality significantly. The necessity of SEW phase information in the WI coder is also investigated in this thesis. Informal subjective test results demonstrate that transmission of SEW magnitude encoded by split/shape-gain VQ and inclusion of a fixed phase spectrum drawn from a voiced segment of a high-pitched male speaker obviates the need to send phase information.