LPC speech coding based on variable-length segment quantization

A low-bit-rate linear predictive coder (LPC) that is based on variable-length segment quantization is presented. In this vocoder, the speech spectral-parameter sequence is represented as the concatenation of variable-length spectral segments generated by linearly time-warping fixed-length code segments. Both the sequence of code segments and the segment lengths are efficiently determined using a dynamic programming procedure. This procedure minimizes the spectral distance measure between the original and the coded spectral sequence in a given interval. An iterative algorithm is developed for designing fixed-length code segments for the training spectral sequence. It updates the segment boundaries of the training spectral sequence using an a priori codebook and updates the codebook using these segment sequences. The convergence of this algorithm is discussed theoretically and experimentally. In experiments, the performance of variable-length segment quantization for voice coding is compared to that of fixed-length segment quantization and vector quantization.