Signal Enhancement of a Variable Rate Vocoder with a Hybrid domain SNR Estimator

Abstract

The human voice is a convenient method of information transfer between different objects such as between men, men and machine, between machines. The development of information and communication technology, the voice has been able to transfer farther than before. The way to communicate, it is to convert the voice to another form, transmit it, and then reconvert it back to sound. In such a communication process, a vocoder is a method of converting and re-converting a voice and sound. The CELP (Code-Excited Linear Prediction) type vocoder, one of the voice codecs, is adapted as a standard codec since it provides high quality sound even though its transmission speed is relatively low. The EVRC (Enhanced Variable Rate CODEC) and QCELP (Qualcomm Code-Excited Linear Prediction), variable bit rate vocoders, are used for mobile phones in 3G environment. For the real-time implementation of a vocoder, the reduction of sound quality is a typical problem. To improve the sound quality, that is important to know the size and shape of noise. In the existing sound quality improvement method, the voice activated is detected or used, or statistical methods are used by the large mount of data. However, there is a disadvantage in that no noise can be detected, when there is a continuous signal or when a change in noise is large.This paper focused on finding a better way to decrease the reduction of sound quality in lower bit transmission environments. Based on simulation results, this study proposed a preprocessor application that estimates the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) using the spectral SNR estimation method. The SNR estimation method adopted the IMBE (Improved Multi-Band Excitation) instead of using the SNR, which is a continuous speech signal. Finally, this application improves the quality of the vocoder by enhancing sound quality adaptively.