High quality coding of wideband audio signals using transform coded excitation (TCX)

This paper describes the application of transform coded excitation (TCX) coding to encoding wideband speech and audio signals in the bit rate range of 16 kbits/s to 32 kbits/s. The approach uses a combination of time domain (linear prediction; pitch prediction) and frequency domain (transform coding; dynamic bit allocation) techniques, and utilizes a synthesis model similar to that of linear prediction coders such as CELP. However, at the encoder, the high complexity analysis-by-synthesis technique is bypassed by directly quantizing the so-called target signal in the frequency domain. The innovative excitation is derived at the decoder by inverse filtering the quantized target signal. The algorithm is intended for applications whereby a large number of bits is available for the innovative excitation. The TCX algorithm is utilized to encode wideband speech and audio signals with a 50-7000 Hz bandwidth. Novel quantization procedures including inter-frame prediction in the frequency domain are proposed to encode the target signal. The proposed algorithm achieves very high quality for speech at 16 kbits/s, and for music at 24 kbits/s