Frame energy estimation based on speech codec parameters

This paper proposes an efficient method for estimating frame energy of speech from enhanced variable rate coder (EVRC) bitstream for network-based speech processing applications in transcoder free operation (TrFO) environments, where speech signals are represented as speech coding parameters. A frame of speech energy is decomposed into the energy of excitation and vocal tract filter, and the frame energy estimation method is derived for each component. Among many parameters of EVRC bitstream, the fixed codebook gain and adaptive codebook gain are used for the estimation of excitation energy, and line spectrum pair (LSP) information is used to estimate the energy of vocal tract filter. Experimental results demonstrated the novelty of the proposed method. The correlation coefficient between the actual and estimated frame energy can be maintained at a value of 0.994 with just 5% multiplicative operations of full decoding.