Efficient coding of LPC parameters by temporal decomposition

This paper describes a method for efficient coding of LPC log area parameters. It is now well recognized that sample-by-sample quantization of LPC parameters is not very efficient in minimizing the bit rate needed to code these parameters. Recent methods for reducing the bit rate have used vector and segment quantization methods. Much of the past work in this area has focussed on efficient coding of LPC parameters in the context of vocoders which put a ceiling on achievable speech quality. The results from these studies cannot be directly applied to synthesis of high quality speech. This paper describes a different approach to efficient coding of log area parameters. Our aim is to determine the extent to which the bit rate of LPC parameters can be reduced without sacrificing speech quality. Speech events occur generally at non-uniformly spaced time intervals. Moreover, some speech events are slow while others are fast. Uniform sampling of speech parameters is thus not efficient. We describe a non-uniform sampling and interpolation procedure for efficient coding of log area parameters. A temporal decomposition technique is used to represent the continuous variation of these parameters as a linearly-weighted sum of a number of discrete elementary components. The location and length of each component is automatically adapted to speech events. We find that each elementary component can be coded as a very low information rate signal.