• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
• /
• v.45 no.2
• /
• pp.81-89
• /
• 2008

Wideband speech, characterized by a bandwidth of about 7 kHz (50-7000 Hz), provides a substantial quality improvement in terms of naturalness and intelligibility. Although higher data rates are required, it has extended its application to audio and video conferencing, high-quality multimedia communications in mobile links or packet-switched transmissions, and digital AM broadcasting. In this paper, we present a new bandwidth-scalable coder for wideband speech and audio signals. The proposed coder spits 8kHz signal bandwidth into two narrow bands, and different coding schemes are applied to each band. The lower-band signal is coded using the ITU-T G.729/G.729E coder, and the higher-band signal is compressed using a new algorithm based on the gammatone filter bank with an invertible auditory model. Due to the split-band architecture and completely independent coding schemes for each band, the output speech of the decoder can be selected to be a narrowband or wideband according to the channel condition. Subjective tests showed that, for wideband speech and audio signals, the proposed coder at 14.2/18 kbit/s produces superior quality to ITU-T 24 kbit/s G.722.1 with the shorter algorithmic delay.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
• /
• v.23 no.1
• /
• pp.73-83
• /
• 2013

In previous works, psychoacoustic parameters have been used for objective quantification. However, these parameters do not agree well with subjective assessment. Therefore, the correlation between psychoacoustic parameters and the subjective rating of door closing sounds of sampled cars is low, and it is not sufficient to use psychoacoustic parameters as an objective metric to quantify the sound quality of door closing sounds. In this paper, a new method is proposed to objectively quantify the sound quality based on physiological acoustics and statistical signal processing. The gammatone filter, as a pre-processing, is used in models of the auditory system and kurtosis, which is the fourth-order moment of temporal signal, and is used to extract information about sound quality quantification for door closing sounds. The new metric obtained through the proposed method is highly correlated with subjective rating, and it is successfully applied to the quantification of the sound quality of door closing sounds.