Efficient coding of transitional speech segments in CELP

Speech coding at low and medium bit rates benefits from the assumption that the speech signal is stationary inside a subframe or even inside consecutive subframes. Speech signals however comprise a considerable amount of transient segments, such as onsets, which are usually difficult to encode with good quality. This paper proposes a method to improve the encoding of transient (sub-)frames by disregarding the adaptive codebook contribution and strengthening the fixed codebook contribution. This can principally be applied to any CELP-like standard speech coder while keeping the same bit rate. The proposed technique has been successfully employed in the ITU-T 4 kbps speech coder candidate commonly proposed by AT&T, Conexant currently Mindspeed, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Matsushita, NTT, and Siemens in November 2001. Simulation results show the improvements achieved by this approach.