A G.711 Embedded Wideband Speech Coding for VoIP Conferences

Yusuke HIWASAKI  Hitoshi OHMURO  Takeshi MORI  Sachiko KURIHARA  Akitoshi KATAOKA 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E89-D  No.9  pp.2542-2552
Publication Date: 2006/09/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Speech and Hearing
Keyword: 
wideband speech,  VoIP,  G.711,  scalable coding,  MCU,  partial mixing,  transcoding, 

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Summary: 
This paper proposes a wideband speech coder in which a G.711 bitstream is embedded. This coder has an advantage over conventional coders in that it has a high interoperability with existing terminals so costly transcoding involving decoding and re-encoding can be avoided. We also propose a partial mixing method that effectively reduces the mixing complexity in multiple-point remote conferences. To reduce the complexity, we take advantage of the scalable structure of the bitstream and mix only the lower band of the signal. For the higher band, the main speaker location is selected among remote locations and is redistributed with the mixed lower-band signal. By subjective evaluations, we show that the speech quality can be maintained even when the speech signals are partially mixed.