An Embedded Scalable Wideband Codec Based on the GSM EFR Codec

We present a technique to extend narrowband (NB) speech communication systems, using e.g. the GSM enhanced full rate (EFR) codec, with wideband (WB, 50-7000 Hz) capability. The limited acoustic bandwidth of narrowband speech coding is extended using a fairly coarse description of the missing high frequency band (3.4-7 kHz) in terms of temporal and spectral envelopes. The high-band parameters are quantized, transmitted and then used at the receiver side to regenerate the high frequency components. The parameter encoding is done by applying split vector quantization in a transformed domain. This quantization scheme can be scaled to match any given target bit rate. Several example configurations have been implemented and tested in MUSHRA-style listening tests