Removal of sparse-excitation artifacts in CELP

In CELP, the use of codebooks with entries with only a few non-zero samples provides high speech quality and facilitates fast computation. With decreasing bit-rate, the intervals between the pulses increase, and the quality of the reconstructed signal begins to suffer from a particular type of artifact, which is strongest for noise-like segments. In this paper we describe experiments which show that the perceived artifacts are mainly concentrated at frequencies above 3 kHz, and this is consistent with our understanding of auditory theory. Our analysis leads to simple strategies to eliminate the artifacts, even at lower bit rates. We describe both a non-adaptive and an adaptive post-processing method to remove the artifacts. The methods are demonstrated to be efficient when used in the ACELP algorithm. A closed-loop method for ACELP is also described