Adaptive Gain Control (AGC)

In the limit, if the power level of all input signals is adjusted to a single value, no bits of the encoder need to be allocated to dynamic range encoding. A process that adjusts all signals to a standard value is referred to as automatic gain control (AGC) AGC removes variations in propagation attenuation AGC cannot be applied to source voice signal without allowances for speech pauses. Otherwise, idle channel noise would be amplified. With AGC, power level of encoded signal need not to be transmitted as done in syllabic companding

Adaptive Gain Encoding

To ascertain the original power level, AGC must be augmented with adaptive gain encoding. There are two basic modes of operation for gain encoding: backward estimation & forward estimation. Backward estimation involves measuring the power level of one segment of speech and using that info to establish gain factor for ensuing speech segments. Forward estimation involves measuring the power level of speech segment and using the gain factor thus derived to adapt the encoder to the same segment.

Forward Estimation AGE

Encoder and Decoder use gain factors related to speech Segments from which they are derived. The disadvantage is that each speech segment is delayed while the gain factor is determined. Framing is reqd to distinguish gain from code, flow control

Speech Redundancies
Lecture - 12

Speech Redundancies

Time-Domain

Freq-Domain

Non-uniform amplitude distortions

Non-uniform long-term spectral densities

Sample to Sample Correlations

Sound-specific short-term spectral densities

Cycle to Cycle Correlations

Pitch-interval to pitchinterval correlations

Inactivity factors (speech pauses)

Non-uniform Amplitude Distributions

Lower amplitude sample values are more common than higher amplitude sample values. Companding procedures can improve quality upto a limit, after that AGC helps to reduce encoder bit rates.

Sample to Sample Correlations

High Correlation Factor of 0.85 The simplest way to exploit sample-to-sample redundancies in speech is to encode only the differences between adjacent samples.

Cycle to Cycle Correlations

Certain sounds use only a few frequencies. When only a few underlying frequencies exist in a sound, the waveform exhibits strong correlations over numerous samples corresponding to several cycles of an oscillation. Encoders exploiting Cycle to Cycle redundancies are more complicated to design and represent a transition from high rate natural sound to low rate synthetic sound.

Pitch-Interval to Pitch-Interval Correlations

Voiced Sounds and Unvoiced Sounds Pitch interval for men: 5 to 20 ms Pitch interval for women: 2.5 to 10 ms 20-40 pitch intervals in a single sound. Pitch interval encoding can provide significant reductions in bit rates, the pitch is difficult to detect sometimes.

Inactivity Factors
A party is 40% active during conversation. TASI and Digital Speech Interpolation (DSI) are used to improve channel utilization.

Non-Uniform Long Term Spectral Densities

A totally random or unpredictable signal in the time domain produces a frequency spectrum that is flat across the bandwidth of interest. Thus a signal that produces uncorrelated time-domain samples makes use of its bandwidth. A non-uniform spectral density represents inefficient use of its bandwidth and is indicative of redundancy in the waveform.

Short Term Spectral Densities

Over shorter periods of time the spectral densities vary considerably and exhibit sound-specific structures with energy peaks (resonances) at some frequencies and energy valleys at others. The frequencies at which the resonances occur are called formant frequencies or simply formants. Freq-domain vocoders exploit formants in encoding. Formants update period is typically 10-20 ms. Less Natural Sound

(Voice Coders) Vocoders

Channel Vocoders Formant Vocoders Linear predictive Vocoders