Evaluation of narrow band speech codecs for Ubiquitous Speech Collection and Analysis Systems

With wireless acoustic sensor network extending to the services like surveillance of sensitive areas, such as Line of Control, or unmanned terrains, interest in robust, narrowband and low bit rate speech codecs is increasing. This has resulted in a need for evaluation of such codecs. This work investigates the different factors like bit rate, algorithmic delay, implementation, and more importantly robustness of codec´s perceptual quality to noise. These factors play a vital role in choosing a speech codec and evaluating its performance. This work examines the selected narrow band speech codecs using ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union) recommendation P.862 tool. This study can also help to choose a speech codec in myriad applications like Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks, Cellular Telephony, VoIP, Underwater Acoustic Monitoring and many other applications where bandwidth plays a vital role and data compression is inevitable.