Sachiko Kurihara

A G.711 Embedded Wideband Speech Coding for VoIP Conferences

This paper proposes a wideband speech coder in which a G.711 bitstream is embedded. This coder has an advantage over conventional coders in that it has a high interoperability with existing terminals so costly transcoding involving decoding and re-encoding can be avoided. We also propose a partial mixing method that effectively reduces the mixing complexity in multiple-point remote conferences. To reduce the complexity, we take advantage of the scalable structure of the bitstream and mix only the lower band of the signal. For the higher band, the main speaker location is selected among remote locations and is redistributed with the mixed lower-band signal. By subjective evaluations, we show that the speech quality can be maintained even when the speech signals are partially mixed.