Sub-band coding with adaptive bit allocation

Abstract The paper presents an efficient method for speech encoding which is based on the well known idea of sub-band coding. Typically, the frequency range from 0.3 kc/s to 3.4 kc/s is split into four sub-bands, and the sub-band signals are encoded separately with different accuracies by means of familiar PCM techniques. An adaptive bit allocation scheme is introduced here, in order to replace the usual form of a fixed distribution of the bit rate among the sub-bands. Listening tests have shown that by these means the bit rate can be reduced by more than 2.5 kb/s without degrading speech quality. Accordingly, highly intelligible reproduction of speech is possible at bit rates below 7 kb/s.