Gender adapted speech coding

Speech coders that are optimized to the characteristics of a particular set of speakers will outperform a speech coder which caters for all speakers; providing that the speaker using it is one of that particular set. This paper describes how speech coders that are optimized to either male or female speech can be an improvement over unoptimised coders. These improvements are bit-rate reduction, speech quality and robustness. A reliable gender identifier is described, which would be practical for the most demanding applications, achieving 95% accuracy after 1 second of speech. The improvements in terms of gender specific speech coding are shown in LSF quantisation with bit-saving, and pitch detection with both bit-saving and robustness