Improved Excitation Coding for 13 kbps Variable Rate QCELP Coder

This paper reports on the optimal design of the excitation codebook in the 13 kbps variable rate QCELP coder of Korean speech. We present two optimal excitation codebooks which consist of 128 and 556 samples, respectively. For the design and test of the improved codebook, a data base of Korean speech is used. A quasi-Newton optimization algorithm was developed to design the codebook. The optimized codebook which remains sparse, can produce an average gain of 0.84 and 0.45 dB in SNR and SEGSNR respectively. Informal listening tests confirm the improvement in speech quality.