A Fixed Rate Speech Coder Based on the Filter Bank Method and the Inflection Point Detection

A fixed rate speech coder based on the filter bank and the non-uniform sampling technique is proposed. The non-uniform sampling is achieved by the detection of inflection points (IPs). A speech block is band passed by the filter bank, and the subband signals are processed by the IP detector, and the detected IP patterns are compared with entries of the IP database. For each subband signal, the address of the closest member of the database and the energy of the IP pattern are transmitted through channel. In the receiver, the decoder recovers the subband signals using the received addresses and the energy information, and reconstructs the speech via the filter bank summation. As results, the coder shows fixed data rate contrary to the existing speech coders based on the non-uniform sampling. Through computer simulation, the usefulness of the proposed technique is confirmed. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance of the proposed method is comparable to that of the uniform sampled pulse code modulation (PCM) below 20 kbps data rate.