A Scalable Audio Coder for High-quality Speech and Audio Services

In this paper, we propose a scalable audio coder, which has a variable bandwidth from the narrowband speech bandwidth to the audio bandwidth and also has a bit-rate from 8 to 320 kbits/s, in order to cope with the quality of service(QoS) according to the network load. First of all, the proposed scalable coder splits bandwidth of the input audio into narrowband up to around 4 kHz and above. Next, the narrowband signals are compressed by a speech coding method compatible to an existing standard speech coder such as G.729, and the other signals whose bandwidth is above the narrowband are compressed on the basis of a psychoacoustic model. It is shown from the objective quality tests using the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) and the perceptual evaluation of audio quality(PEAQ) that the proposed scalable audio coder provides a comparable quality to the MPEG-1 Layer III (MP3) audio coder.