Statistical Block Protection Coding for DPCM-AQF Speech

The statistical block protection coding scheme [2] for protecting DPCM encoded speech signals through noisy channels has been extended to accommodate DPCM-AQF encoded speech, where AQF stands for adaptive quantization with forward (explicit) transmission of step size. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gains, typically 12 dB, have been achieved over a dynamic range > 20 dB for a bit error rate (BER) of 1.4 percent and the SNR improvement is found to increase with BER. Perceptual improvements in decoded speech have a good correspondence with the gains in SNR. The penalty for this substantial enhancement in the performance of the DPCM-AQF system is an increase in transmission bit rate of 3.5 percent and encoding delay of 64 ms.