ITU-T EV-VBR: A robust 8-32 kbit/s scalable coder for error prone telecommunications channels

This paper presents ITU-T Embedded Variable Bit-Rate (EV-VBR) codec being standardized by Question 9 of Study Group 16 (Q9/16) as recommendation G.718. The codec provides a scalable solution for compression of 16 kHz sampled speech and audio signals at rates between 8 kbit/s and 32 kbit/s, robust to significant rates of frame erasures or packet losses. It comprises 5 layers where higher layer bitstreams can be discarded without affecting the lower layer decoding. The core layer takes advantage of signal-classification based CELP encoding. The second layer reduces the coding error from the first layer by means of additional pitch contribution and another algebraic codebook. The higher layers encode the weighted error signal from lower layers using MDCT transform coding. Several technologies are used to encode the MDCT coefficients for best performance both for speech and music. The codec performance is demonstrated with selected results from ITU-T Characterization test.