CELP coding using trellis-coded vector quantization of the excitation

We analyze the performance of a CELP coder where the vector quantization (VQ) of the excitation is replaced with trellis-coded vector quantization (TCVQ). Our results show that TCVQ performs significantly better than VQ, with reasonable complexity. This makes TCVQ a fair choice for trading quality against complexity and/or delay. We describe a systematic procedure to replace VQ with TCVQ for existing CELP coders. We propose an optimization algorithm to appropriately populate the trellis. We show how pseudo-Gray coding can be applied to the TCVQ codebook to improve intrinsic coder robustness to channel errors. Finally, we evaluate the complexity and performance of the method.