Challenges of 16 kHz in acoustic pre- and post-processing for terminals

The standardization of the AMR-WB speech codec by 3GPP opens a new area on audio pre-and post-processing integrated in telecommunication terminals. It appears that the transition from narrowband to wideband signals is not a trivial task, but can rather be seen as a challenge, as acoustic quality requirements, scalability and computational limitations have to be faced at the same time. This article presents key examples to address the transition issue as well as proposals for low-complexity implementations of acoustic echo cancellation and noise reduction