Effects of Packet Losses in Waveform Coded Speech and Improvements Due to an Odd-Even Sample-Interpolation Procedure

We have studied the effects of random packet losses in digital speech systems based on 12-bit PCM and 4-bit adaptive DPCM coding. The effects are a function of packet length
B
and probability of packet loss P
L
. We have also studied tbe benefits of an odd-even sample-interpolation procedure that mitigates these effects (at the cost of increased decoding delay). The procedure is based on arranging a
2B
-block of codewords into two
B
-sample packets, an odd-sample packet and an even-sample packet. If one of these packets is lost, the odd (or even) samples of the
2B
-block are estimated from the even (or odd) samples by means of adaptive interpolation. Perceptual considerations indicate that packet lengths most robust to losses are in the range 16-32 ms, irrespective of whether interpolation is used or not. With these packet lengths, tolerable P
L
values, which are strictly input-speech-dependent, can be as high as 2 to 5 percent without interpolation and 5 to 10 percent with interpolation. These observations are based on a computer simulation with three sentence-length speech inputs, and on informal listening tests.