A scalable coding scheme based on interframe dependency limitation

While VoIP (Voice over IP) is gaining importance in comparison with other types of telephony, packet loss remains as the main source of degradation in VoIP systems. Traditional speech codecs, such as those based on the CELP (Code Excited Linear Prediction) paradigm, can achieve low bit-rates at the cost of introducing interframe dependencies. As a result, the effect of a packet loss burst is propagated to the frames correctly received after the burst. iLBC (internet Low Bit-rate Codec) alleviates this problem by removing the interframe dependencies at the cost of a higher bit-rate. In this paper we propose a combination of iLBC with an ACELP (Algebraic CELP) codec in which a variable number of ACELP-coded frames is inserted between every two iLBC-coded frames. The experimental results show that the combined codec can achieve a performance close to that of iLBC at different loss conditions but with a smaller bit-rate. Also, scalability is achieved by modifying the number of inserted ACELP-coded frames.