Adaptive vector quantization for speech spectrum coding

We address the problem of speech compression at very low rates, with the short-term spectrum compressed to less than 20 bits per frame. Current techniques apply structured vector quantization (VQ) to the short-term synthesis filter coefficients to achieve rates of the order of 24 to 26 bits per frame. In this paper we show that temporal correlations in the VQ index stream can be introduced by dynamic codebook ordering, and that these correlations can be exploited by lossless coding approaches to reduce the number of bits per frame of the VQ scheme. The use of lossless coding ensures that no additional distortion is introduced, unlike other interframe techniques. We then detail two constructive algorithms which are able to exploit this redundancy. The first method is a delayed-decision approach, which dynamically adapts the VQ codebook to allow for efficient entropy coding of the index stream. The second is based on a vector subcodebook approach and does not incur any additional delay. Experimental results are presented for both methods to validate the approach, (C) 1999 Academic Press.