A Multipulse-Based Forward Error Correction Technique for Robust CELP-Coded Speech Transmission Over Erasure Channels

The widely used code-excited linear prediction (CELP) paradigm relies on a strong interframe dependency which renders CELP-based codecs vulnerable to packet loss. The use of long-term prediction (LTP) or adaptive codebooks (ACB) is the main source of interframe dependency in these codecs, since they employ the excitation from previous frames. After a frame erasure, previous excitation is unavailable and a desynchronization between the encoder and the decoder appears, causing an additional distortion which is propagated to the subsequent frames. In this paper, we propose a novel media-specific Forward Error Correction (FEC) technique which retrieves LTP-resynchronization with no additional delay at the cost of a very small bit of overhead. In particular, the proposed FEC code contains a multipulse signal which replaces the excitation of the previous frame (i.e., ACB memory) when this has been lost. This multipulse description of the previous excitation is optimized to minimize the perceptual error between the synthesized speech signal and the original one. To this end, we develop a multipulse formulation which includes the additional CELP processing and, in addition, can cope with the presence of advanced LTP filters and the usual subframe segmentation applied in modern codecs. Finally, a quantization scheme is proposed to encode pulse parameters. Objective and subjective quality tests applied to our proposal show that the propagation error due to LTP filter can practically be removed with a very little bandwidth increase.