A CELP variable rate speech codec with low average rate

This paper presents a variable-rate CELP codec which achieves good communications speech quality at an average rate of about 3 kb/s. The codec operates as a source-controlled variable rate coder with rates of 4.9 kb/s for voiced and transition sounds, 3.0 kb/s for unvoiced sounds and 670 b/s for silent frames. New techniques used in the codec include prediction of the fixed codebook target vector and joint optimization of the adaptive and fixed codebook search. The prediction of the fixed codebook target vector is based on fixed codebook selections in previous subframes and a running estimate for the fundamental frequency. Informal subjective testing (MOS) indicates that the proposed codec, at an average rate of less than 3.2 kb/s, achieves better quality than fixed rate standard codecs with rates in the range 4-4.8 kb/s.