A method and device for concealing frame erasures caused by frames of an encoded sound signal erased during transmission from an encoder to a decoder and for recovery of the decoder after frame erasures comprise, in the encoder, determining concealment/recovery parameters including at least phase information related to frames of the encoded sound signal. The concealment/recovery parameters determined in the encoder are transmitted to the decoder and, in the decoder, frame erasure concealment is conducted in response to the received concealment/recovery parameters. The frame erasure concealment comprises resynchronizing, in response to the received phase information, the erasure-concealed frames with corresponding frames of the sound signal encoded at the encoder. When no concealment/recovery parameters are transmitted to the decoder, a phase information of each frame of the encoded sound signal that has been erased during transmission from the encoder to the decoder is estimated in the decoder. Also, frame erasure concealment is conducted in the decoder in response to the estimated phase information, wherein the frame erasure concealment comprises resynchronizing, in response to the estimated phase information, each erasure-concealed frame with a corresponding frame of the sound signal encoded at the encoder.

Method and device for efficient frame erasure concealment in speech codecs

A technique is described for concealing the effect of a lost frame in a series of frames representing an encoded audio signal in a sub-band predictive coding system. In accordance with the technique, a first synthesized sub-band audio signal is synthesized, wherein synthesizing the first synthesized sub-band audio signal comprises performing waveform extrapolation based on a stored first sub-band decoded audio signal. A second synthesized sub-band audio signal is also synthesized, wherein synthesizing the second synthesized sub-band audio signal comprises performing waveform extrapolation based on the stored second sub-band decoded audio signal. The first synthesized sub-band audio signal and the second synthesized sub-band audio signal are combined to generate a synthesized full-band output audio signal corresponding to a lost frame.

Packet loss concealment for sub-band predictive coding based on extrapolation of sub-band audio waveforms

An overall encoding procedure and associated decoding procedure are presented. The encoding procedure involves at least two signal encoding processes operating on signal representations of a set of audio input channels. Local synthesis is used in connection with a first encoding process to generate a locally decoded signal, including a representation of the encoding error of the first encoding process. This locally decoded signal is applied as input to a second encoding process. The overall encoding procedure generates at least two residual encoding error signals from at least one of said encoding processes, including at least said second encoding process. The residual error signals are then subjected to compound residual encoding in a further encoding process, preferably based on correlation between the residual error signals.

Joint enhancement of multi-channel audio

The invention relates to the technical field of audio encoding and/or decoding technologies, and thus concerns an overall encoding procedure and associated decoding procedure. The encoding procedure involves at least two signal encoding processes (S1-S3) operating on signal representations of a set of audio input channels, as well as residual encoding (S7-S8). It also involves a dedicated process (S4-S6) to estimate and encode energies of the audio input channels. Each encoding process is associated with a corresponding decoding process. In the overall decoding procedure the decoded signals from each encoding process are preferably combined such that the output channels are close to the input channels in terms of energy and/or quality. Normally, the combination step also adapts to the possible loss of one or more signal representation in part or in whole, such that the energy and quality is optimized with the signals at hand in the decoder. In this way, the overall quality of the output channels is improved.

Energy conservative multi-channel audio coding

A technique is described for reducing audible artifacts in an audio output signal generated by decoding a received frame in a series of frames. According to the technique, if the received frame is one of a predefined number of received frames following a lost frame, at least one parameter or signal associated with the decoding of the received frame is altered from a state associated with normal decoding. The received frame is then decoded in accordance with the at least one parameter or signal.

Constrained and controlled decoding after packet loss

The adaptive codebook used in code-excited linear prediction (CELP)-like speech codecs is very effective for modeling the quasi-periodic component of the excitation signal but, unfortunately, introduces a strong interframe dependency that renders the decoder vulnerable to frame erasures. For voiced speech, the error affects not only the erased frame but also all the subsequent frames. In this paper, a technique to improve the recovery after a frame erasure is proposed. The technique consists in a constrained excitation search at the encoder and a resynchronization procedure at the decoder. The constraint aims at reducing the contribution of the adaptive codebook by making the innovation codebook partially model the pitch excitation. Further, for highly voiced frames, the pitch-related information contained in the innovation excitation is exploited at the decoder to speed up the resynchronization of the adaptive codebook after a frame erasure. When applied to the adaptive multirate wideband (AMR-WB) codec, the method brings a significant improvement in the case of frame erasures, at the cost of a minor quality loss compared to the standard codec at the same bit rate. The method does not need additional delay and has the advantage of maintaining full interoperability between the standard codec and its modified version.

Fast Recovery for a CELP-Like Speech Codec After a Frame Erasure

The adaptive codebook used in CELP (Code Excited Linear Prediction) codecs to model the pitch excitation allows the attainement of a high quality of synthesized speech but introduces a strong inter-frame dependency and consequently causes error propagation in case of frame erasure. In a previous work we showed that the error propagation can be greatly reduced by constraining, at the encoder side, the innovative codebook to partially model the pitch excitation. In this paper we extend this work by exploiting, at the decoder side, the pitch-related information present in the innovative excitation to speed up the recovery of the decoder. The method consists in adequately shifting the last pitch pulse present within the corrupted adaptive codebook memory so that it is resynchronized with the excitation parameters of the frame that follows the erased one.

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Resynchronization of the Adaptive Codebook in a Constrained celp Codec After a Frame Erasure

The adaptive codebook used in CELP-like speech coders is extremely effective on voiced signals. Unfortunately, it is also the main source of error propagation at the decoder when a frame is lost. In this paper, we study several ways of limiting the energy contribution of the adaptive codebook to the synthesized speech signal. We show that a constrained search of the adaptive and innovative codebooks significantly improves the recovery time of the decoder after a lost frame, at the cost of only minor quality degradation in a clear channel. When applied to a standard codec such as the AMR-WB, this constraint only affects the encoder, and the modified codec remains fully interoperable with the standard codec.

M. Chibani

Papers

Fast Recovery for a CELP-Like Speech Codec After a Frame Erasure

Resynchronization of the Adaptive Codebook in a Constrained celp Codec After a Frame Erasure

Increasing the robustness of CELP-based coders by constrained optimization