Robust speech decoding: a universal approach to bit error concealment

In digital mobile communication systems there is the need for reducing the subjective effects of residual bit errors which have not been eliminated by channel decoding by the use of error concealment techniques. Due to the fact that most standards do not specify these algorithms bit exactly, there is room for new solutions to improve the speech quality. This article develops a new approach for optimum estimation of the speech codec parameters. It can be applied to any speech codec standard if bit reliability information is provided by the demodulator (e.g. DECT), or by the channel decoder (e.g. soft-output Viterbi algorithm-SOVA in GSM). The proposed method includes an inherent muting mechanism leading to a graceful degradation of speech quality in case of adverse transmission conditions. Particularly the additional exploitation of the residual source redundancy, i.e. some a priori knowledge about the codec parameters gives a significant enhancement of the output speech quality. In the case of an error free channel, bit exactness as required by the standards can be preserved