PREPROCESSING METHOD FOR ENHANCING DIGITAL AUDIO QUALITY IN SPEECH COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

摘要

This paper presents a preprocessing method to modify the input audio signals of a speech coder to obtain the finally enhanced signals at the decoder. For the purpose, we introduce the noise suppression (NS) scheme and the adaptive gain control (AGC) where an audio input and its coding error are considered as a noisy signal and a noise, respectively. The coding error is suppressed from the input and then the suppressed input is level aligned to the original input by the following AGC operation. Consequently, this preprocessing method makes the spectral energy of the music input redistributed all over the spectral domain so that the preprocessed music can be coded more effectively by the following coder. As a weak point, this procedure needs an additional encoding pass to calculate the coding error. However, it provides a generalized formulation applicable to a lot of existing speech coders. By preference listening tests, it was indicated that the proposed approach produces significant enhancements in the perceived music qualities.