Harmonic+noise coding using improved V/UV mixing and efficient spectral quantization

This paper presents a harmonic+noise speech coder which uses an efficient spectral quantization technique and a novel voiced/unvoiced (V/UV) mixing model. The harmonic magnitudes are coded at 23 bits/frame using the magnitude response of a linear predictive coding (LPC) system. The difference between the harmonic magnitudes and the sampled magnitude response is minimized by the closed-loop approach. The V/UV mixing is modeled by a smooth function which is derived from the speech spectrum envelope based on the flatness measure. The V/UV mixing model allows noise to be added in the harmonic portion of speech spectrum so that buzzyness is reduced. The V/UV mixing information is determined from the spectral parameters available in the decoder, no bits are needed for transmitting the V/UV information. A 1.4 kbps harmonic coder is developed. The speech quality of the coder is comparable to other harmonic coders operating at higher rates.