A 1.6 kb/s MELP coder for wireless communications

This paper describes our new mixed excitation linear predictive (MELP) coder designed for wireless applications. This new coder, through algorithmic improvements and enhanced quantization techniques, produces better speech quality at 1.6 kb/s than the new U.S. Federal Standard MELP coder at 2.4 kb/s. A key feature of the coder is a novel line spectral frequencies (LSF) quantization scheme, requiring only 20 bits per frame. With channel coding (using convolutional codes), the new MELP coder at 3.1 kb/s is capable of maintaining good speech quality even in very degraded channels.