Wideband enhancement of narrowband coded speech using MBE re-synthesis

In this paper, a method for improving the quality of narrowband CELP-coded speech is present. The approach is to reduce the hoarse quality of CELP-coded speech by enhancing the pitch periodicity in the reproduction signal and also to reduce the muffing characteristics of narrowband speech by regenerating the highband components of speech spectra from the reproduction signal. In the proposed method, multiband excitation (MBE) analysis is performed on the reproduction speech signal from a CELP decoder and the pitch periodicity is enhanced by re-synthesizing the speech signal using a harmonic synthesizer according to the MBE model. The highband magnitude spectra are regenerated by matching to lowband spectra using a trained wideband spectral codebook. Information about the voiced/unvoiced (V/UV) excitation in the highband are derived from a training procedure and then stored alongside with the wideband spectral codebook so that they can be recovered by indexing to the codebook using the matched lowband index. Simulation results indicate that the quality of the wideband re-synthesized speech is significantly improved over the narrowband CELP-coded speech.