Techniques and tools related to coding and decoding of audio information are described. For example, redundant coded information for decoding a current frame includes signal history information associated with only a portion of a previous frame. As another example, redundant coded information for decoding a coded unit includes parameters for a codebook stage to be used in decoding the current coded unit only if the previous coded unit is not available. As yet another example, coded audio units each include a field indicating whether the coded unit includes main encoded information representing a segment of an audio signal, and whether the coded unit includes redundant coded information for use in decoding main encoded information.

Sub-band voice codec with multi-stage codebooks and redundant coding

An enhanced low-bit rate parametric voice coder that groups a number of frames from an underlying frame-based vocoder, such as MELP, into a superframe structure. Parameters are extracted from the group of underlying frames and quantized into the superframe which allows the bit rate of the underlying coding to be reduced without increasing the distortion. The speech data coded in the superframe structure can then be directly synthesized to speech or may be transcoded to a format so that an underlying frame-based vocoder performs the synthesis. The superframe structure includes additional error detection and correction data to reduce the distortion caused by the communication of bit errors.

LPC-harmonic vocoder with superframe structure

Techniques and tools are described for processing reconstructed audio signals. For example, a reconstructed audio signal is filtered in the time domain using filter coefficients that are calculated, at least in part, in the frequency domain. As another example, producing a set of filter coefficients for filtering a reconstructed audio signal includes clipping one or more peaks of a set of coefficient values. As yet another example, for a sub-band codec, in a frequency region near an intersection between two sub-bands, a reconstructed composite signal is enhanced.

Audio codec post-filter

Various strategies for rate/quality control and loss resiliency in an audio codec are described. The various strategies can be used in combination or independently. For example, a real-time speech codec uses intra frame coding/decoding, adaptive multi-mode forward error correction [“FEC”], and rate/quality control techniques. Intra frames help a decoder recover quickly from packet losses, while compression efficiency is still emphasized with predicted frames. Various strategies for inserting intra frames and signaling intra/predicted frames are described. With the adaptive multi-mode FEC, an encoder adaptively selects between multiple modes to efficiently and quickly provide a level of FEC that takes into account the bandwidth currently available for FEC. The FEC information itself may be predictively encoded and decoded relative to primary encoded information. Various rate/quality and FEC control strategies allow additional adaptation to available bandwidth and network conditions.

Audio encoding and decoding with intra frames and adaptive forward error correction

This paper evaluates MPEG-4 narrowband (NB) CELP speech coding under various mobile communication conditions, such as clean, background noise and transmission errors In order to make the codec robust against the errors with minimum increase of redundant bits, a CRC error correction code is attached into the codec as well as an error concealment is included in the decoder Subjective evaluation results demonstrate that the speech quality for MPEG-4 speech coding at above 83 kb/s is higher than that for the ITU-T G726 ADPCM at 32 kb/s in the clean speech condition Further, the speech quality degradation is less than 01 in MOS under 10/sup -3/ bit error conditions, and still comparable to or higher than that for G726 at 32 kb/s without error

K. Yoshida

Papers

Study and subjective evaluation on MPEG-4 narrowband CELP coding under mobile communication conditions