A New Wideband Speech/Audio Coder Interoperable with ITU-T G.729/G.729E

Wideband speech, characterized by a bandwidth of about 7 kHz (50-7000 Hz), provides a substantial quality improvement in terms of naturalness and intelligibility. Although higher data rates are required, it has extended its application to audio and video conferencing, high-quality multimedia communications in mobile links or packet-switched transmissions, and digital AM broadcasting. In this paper, we present a new bandwidth-scalable coder for wideband speech and audio signals. The proposed coder spits 8kHz signal bandwidth into two narrow bands, and different coding schemes are applied to each band. The lower-band signal is coded using the ITU-T G.729/G.729E coder, and the higher-band signal is compressed using a new algorithm based on the gammatone filter bank with an invertible auditory model. Due to the split-band architecture and completely independent coding schemes for each band, the output speech of the decoder can be selected to be a narrowband or wideband according to the channel condition. Subjective tests showed that, for wideband speech and audio signals, the proposed coder at 14.2/18 kbit/s produces superior quality to ITU-T 24 kbit/s G.722.1 with the shorter algorithmic delay.