Multisensor very lowbit rate speech coding using segment quantization

We present two approaches to noise robust very low bit rate speech coding using wideband MELP analysis/synthesis. Both methods exploit multiple acoustic and non-acoustic input sensors, using our previously-presented dynamic waveform fusion algorithm to simultaneously perform waveform fusion, noise suppression, and cross-channel noise cancellation. One coder uses a 600 bps scalable phonetic vocoder, with a phonetic speech recognizer followed by joint predictive vector quantization of the error in wideband MELP parameters. The second coder operates at 300 bps with fixed 80 ms segments, using novel variable-rate multistage matrix quantization techniques. Formal test results show that both coders achieve equivalent intelligibility to the 2.4 kbps NATO standard MELPe coder in harsh acoustic noise environments, at much lower bit rates, with only modest quality loss.