Robustness of the Mbe Vocoder to Acoustic Background Noise

I.I.T. Bombay, in collaboration with C.R.L., B.E.L., is working on developing a speech codec to provide communication quality speech at low bit rates. The codec is required to be robust to acoustic background noise and to channel errors. A sinusoidal coder based on the MBE (Multiband Excitation) model has been adopted as the basic speech representation due to its compact parameter set and the relatively robust, available parameter estimation algorithms. This paper reports a study on the influence of acoustic background noise on the performance of an MBE vocoder with the eventual goal of designing a suitable speech enhancement preprocessor for use in low SNR situations.