LOW BIT RATE SPEECH CODING

Introduction: Speech processing is currently a key focus for many researchers

in the area of Digital Signal Processing. This project is focus speech coding, at rates below 4kb/s is needed for both communication and voice storage applications. Speech signal processing refers to the acquisition, manipulation, storage, transfer and output of human utterances by a computer. The main goals are the recognition, synthesis and compression of human speech. To accommodate many speech signals in a given bandwidth in a Cellular System, each digitized signal is compressed before transmission. For low bit rate speech coding, Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) is widely used. The main objective is to remove the redundancy in speech, so that smaller number of bits is used in representing the speech signal. This saves the bandwidth required for communication. Low bit rate coders rely on Parametric models to represent only the most perceptually relevant aspects of speech. Low bit rate speech coding can now provide reliable communications while there are a number of other approaches are available to achieve this, such as MELP, STC, MBE, and WI, all rely on flexible parametric models combined with sophisticated quantization techniques. Low rate speech coding or compression attempts to provide toll-quality speech at a minimum bit rate for digital transmission or storage. The advantages to be gained are bandwidth efficiency, cost reduction, security, robustness to transmission errors, and flexibility in the digital world. The trade-offs, dependent on the particular coding technique and the application, are coding delay and distortion, and increased equipment costs. Speech coding is an important aspect of modern telecommunications systems. Speech coding is a process of digitally representing the speech signals. The primary objective of the speech coding is to represent the speech signal with the fewest number of bits, while maintaining the sufficient level of quality of the retrieved or synthesized speech with reasonable computational complexity. To achieve high quality speech at low bit rate, coding algorithms apply sophisticated methods to reduce the redundancies that is to remove the irrelevant information from the speech signals. In addition a lower bit rate implies that a smaller

bandwidth is required for transmission. Although in wired communications very large bandwidths are now available as a result of the introduction of optical fibers, but in wireless and satellite communications bandwidth is limited. At the same time, multimedia communications and some other speech related applications need to store the digitized voice. Reducing the bit rates implies that a less memory is needed for storage. these two applications of speech communications make speech coding or speech processing an attractive field of research.

APPLICATIONS
In general, the most common usage for speech compression is in standard telephone systems. In fact, a lot of the technology used in speech compression was developed by the phone companies. Linear predictive coding only has 20 applications in the area of secure telephony because of its low bit rate. Secure telephone systems require a low bit rate since speech is first digitalized, then encrypted and transmitted. These systems have a primary goal of decreasing the bit rate as much as possible while maintaining a level of speech quality that is understandable. Other standards such as the digital cellular standard and the international telephone network standard have higher quality standards and therefore require a higher bit rate. In these standards, understanding the speech is not good enough, the listener must also be able to recognize the speech as belonging to the original source. A second area that linear predictive coding has been used is in Text-to-Speech synthesis. In this type of synthesis the speech has to be generated from text. Since LPC synthesis involves the generation of speech based on a model of the vocal tract, it provides a perfect method for generating speech from text . Further applications of LPC and other speech compression schemes are voice mail systems, telephone answering machines, and multimedia applications. Most multimedia applications, unlike telephone applications, involve one-way communication and involve storing the data. An example of a multimedia application that would involve speech is an

application that allows voice annotations about a text document to be saved with the document. The method of speech compression used in multimedia applications depends on the desired speech quality and the limitations of storage space for the application. Linear Predictive Coding provides a favorable method of speech compression for multimedia applications since it provides the smallest storage space as a result of its low bit rate. Speech coding or speech compression is also used in IP telephony. Speech codecs compress the voice in such a way as to affect its quality and in turn the quality of service (QoS) delivered by IP telephony systems. The speech encoder converts the digitized speech signal (after A/D conversion) to a bit-stream, which is packetized and sent over the IP network. The speech decoder then reconstructs the speech signal from the packets received.