Speech coding

Speech coding is an application of data compression of digital audio signals containing speech. Speech coding uses speech-specific parameter estimation using audio signal processing techniques to model the speech signal, combined with generic data compression algorithms to represent the resulting modeled parameters in a compact bitstream.

The two most important applications of speech coding are mobile telephony and Voice over IP.

The techniques employed in speech coding are similar to those used in audio data compression and audio coding where knowledge in psychoacoustics is used to transmit only data that is relevant to the human auditory system. For example, in voiceband speech coding, only information in the frequency band 400 Hz to 3500 Hz is transmitted but the reconstructed signal is still adequate for intelligibility.

Speech coding differs from other forms of audio coding in that speech is a much simpler signal than most other audio signals, and a lot more statistical information is available about the properties of speech. As a result, some auditory information which is relevant in audio coding can be unnecessary in the speech coding context. In speech coding, the most important criterion is preservation of intelligibility and "pleasantness" of speech, with a constrained amount of transmitted data.

The intelligibility of speech includes, besides the actual literal content, also speaker identity, emotions, intonation, timbre etc. that are all important for perfect intelligibility. The more abstract concept of pleasantness of degraded speech is a different property than intelligibility, since it is possible that degraded speech is completely intelligible, but subjectively annoying to the listener.

In addition, most speech applications require low coding delay, as long coding delays interfere with speech interaction.

Speech coders are of 2 types:

From this viewpoint, the A-law and μ-law algorithms (G.711) used in traditional PCM digital telephony can be seen as a very early precursor of speech encoding, requiring only 8 bits per sample but giving effectively 12 bits of resolution. The logarithmic companding laws are consistent with human hearing perception in that a low-amplitude noise is heard along a low-amplitude speech signal but is masked by a high-amplitude one. Although this would generate unacceptable distortion in a music signal, the peaky nature of speech waveforms, combined with the simple frequency structure of speech as a periodic waveform having a single fundamental frequency with occasional added noise bursts, make these very simple instantaneous compression algorithms acceptable for speech.

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