AU767779B2 - Repetitive sound compression system - Google Patents

Description

AUSTRALIA

Patents Act 1990 COMPLETE SPECIFICATION STANDARD PATENT Applicant(s): AMERICA ONLINE, INC.

Invention Title: REPETITIVE SOUND COMPRESSION SYSTEM The following statement is a full description of this invention, including the best method of performing it known to us: WO 97/15046 PCT/US96/16693 -i4- iR- REPETITIVE SOUND COMPRESSION SYSTEM Field of the Invention The present invention teaches a system for compressing quasi-periodic sound by comparing it to presampled portions in a codebook.

Background and Summary Many sound compression schemes take advantage of the repetitive nature of everyday sounds. For example, the standard human voice coding device or "vocoder", is often used for compressing and encoding human voice sounds. A vocoder is a class of voice coder/decoders that models the human vocal tract.

*A typical vocoder models the input sound as two 15 parts: the voice sound known as V, and the unvoice sound known as U. The channel through which these signals are conducted is modelled as a lossless cylinder. The output speech is compressed based on this model.

Strictly speaking, speech is not periodic.

20 However, the voice part of speech is often labeled as quasi-periodic due to its pitch frequency. The sounds produced during the un-voiced region, are highly random.

Speech is always referred to as non-stationary and stochastic. Certain parts of speech may have redundancy 25 and perhaps correlated to some prior portion of speech to some extent, but they are not simply repeated.

The main intent of using a vocoder is to find ways to compress the source, as opposed to performing compression of the result. The source in this case is the excitation formed by glottal pulses. The result is the human speech we hear. However, there are many ways that the human vocal tract can modulate the glottal pulses to form human voice. Estimations of the glottal pulses are predicted and then coded. Such a model WO 97/15046 PCTIUS96/16693 2 reduces the dynamic range of the resulting speech, hence rendering the speech more compressible.

More generally, the special kind of speech filtering can remove speech portions that are not perceived by the human ear. With the vocoder model in place, a residue portion of the speech can be made compressible due to its lower dynamic range.

The term "residue" has multiple meanings. It generally refers to the output of the analysis filter, the inverse of the synthesis filter which models the vocal tract. In the present situation, residue takes on multiple meanings at different stages: at stage 1- after the inverse filter (all zero filter), stage 2: after the long term pitch predictor or the so-called adaptive pitch 15 VQ, stage 3: after the pitch codebook, and at stage 4: after the noise codebook. The term "residue" as used herein literally refers to the remaining portion of the 'speech by-product which results from previous processing stages.

20 The preprocessed speech is then encoded. A typical vocoder uses an 8 kHz sampling rate at 16 bits per sample. These numbers are nothing magic, however S: they are based on the bandwidth of telephone lines.

The sampled information is further processed by a speech codec which outputs an 8 kHz signal. That signal may be post-processed, which may be the opposite of the input processing. Other further processing that is designed to further enhance the quality and character of the signal may be used.

The suppression of noise also models the way that humans perceives sound. Different weights are used at different times according to the strength of speech both in the frequency and time domain. The masking properties of human hearing cause loud signals at different frequencies to mask the effect of low level signals 3 around those frequencies. This is also true in the time domain. The result is that more noise can be tolerated during that portion of time and frequency. This allows us to pay more attention elsewhere. This is called "perceptual weighting" it allows us to pick vectors which are perceptually more effective.

The human vocal tract can be (and is) modelled by a set of lossless cylinders with varying diameters. Typically, it is modelled by an 8 to 12th order all-pole filter 1/A(Z).

Its inverse counterpart A(Z) is an all-zero filter with the same order. Output speech is reproduced by exciting the synthesis filter 1/A(z) with the excitation. The excitation, or glottal pulses is estimated by inverse 15 filtering the speech signal with the inverse filter A(z).

A digital signal processor often models the synthesis filter as the transfer function H(V) This means that this model is an all-pole process. Ideally, the model is more complicated, and includes both poles and zeros.

Much of the compressibility of speech comes from its quasiperiodicity. Speech is quasi-periodic due to its pitch frequency around voice sound. Male speech usually has a pitch between 50 and 100 Hz. Female speech usually has a 25 pitch above 100Hz.

oi S"While the above describes compression systems for voice coding, the same general principles are used to code and compress other similar kinds of sound.

Various techniques are known for improving the model. Each of these techniques, however, increases the necessary bandwidth to carry the signal. This produces a tradeoff between bandwidth of the compressed signal and quality of the non-steady-state sound.

4- The present invention provides a sound compression system for generating a compressed sound output, comprising: a first processing element structured and arranged to characterize a first sound representation and to generate first characterization results; a second processing element structured and arranged to characterize a second sound representation and to generate second characterization results; and 10 a first comparison element structured and arranged to perform a first comparison that compares a first comparison input related to the first sound representation with a second comparison input related to the second sound representation and to determine Scontents of the compressed sound output based on whether a first comparison result -satisfies a first predetermined threshold criteria.

The present invention also provides a method of compressing sound, comprising: 20 characterizing a first sound representation to produce first characterization results, oooo the first characterization results including at least a first processing element residual; o* a characterizing a second sound representation and producing second characterization results indicative thereof, the second characterization results including at least a second processing element residual; and correlating a first comparison input related to the first sound representation with a second comparison input related to the second sound representation and determining the contents of the compressed sound output based on whether a first comparison result satisfies a first predetermined threshold criteria.

4a Brief Description of the Drawings These and other aspects of the present invention will now be described with reference to the accompanying drawings in which: Figure 1 shows a block diagram of the basic vocoder of the present invention; and Figure 2 the advanced codebook technique of the present invention.

Description of the Preferred Embodiments Figure 1 shows the advance vocoder of the present WO 97/15046 PCT/US96/16693 lossless. The human vocal tract also has side passages such as the nose.

Speech to be coded 100 is input to an analysis block 102 which analyzes the content of the speech as described herein. The analysis block produces a short term residual alone with other parameters.

Analysis in this case refers as LPC analysis as depicted above in our lossless tube model, that includes, for example, computation of windowing, autocorrelation, Durbin's recursion, and computation of predictive coefficients are performed. In addition, filtering incoming speech with the analysis filter based on the computed predictive coefficients will generate the residue, the short term residue STAres 104.

15 This short term residual 104 is further coded by the coding process 110, to output codes or symbols 120 indicative of the compressed speech. Coding of this preferred embodiment involves performing three codebook searches, to minimize the perceptually-weighted error signal. This process is done in a cascaded manner such that codebook searches are done one after another.

The current codebooks used are all shape gain VQ codebooks. The perceptually-weighted filter is generated adaptively using the predictive coefficients from the current sub-frame. The filter input is the difference between the residue from previous stage versus the shape gain vector from the current stage, also called the residue, is used for next stage. The output of this filter is the perceptually weighted error signal. This operation is shown.and explained in more detail with reference to Figure 2. Perceptually-weighted error from each stage is used as a target for the searching in next stage.

The compressed speech or a sample thereof 122 is also fed back to a synthesizer 124, which reconstitutes a WO 97/15046 PCTIUS96/16693 6 reconstituted original block 126. The synthesis stage decodes the linear combination of the vectors to form a reconstruction residue, the result is used to initialize the state of the next search in next sub-frame.

Comparison of the original versus the reconstructed sound results in an error signal which will drive subsequent codebook searches to further minimize such perceptually-weighted error. The objective of the subsequent coder is to code this residue very efficiently.

The reconstituted block 126 indicates what would be received at the-receiving end. The difference between the input speech 100 and the reconstituted speech 126 hence represents an error signal 132.

15 This error signal is perceptually weighted by weighting block 134. The perceptual weighting according to the present invention weights the signal using a model S. of what would be heard by the human ear. The perceptually-weighted signal 136 is then heuristically 20 processed by heuristic processor 140 as described herein.

Heuristic searching techniques are used which take advantage of the fact that some codebooks searches are unnecessary and as a result can be eliminated. The eliminated codebooks are typically codebooks down the search chain. The unique process of dynamically and adaptively performing such elimination is described herein.

The selection criterion chosen is primarily based on the correlation between the residue from a prior stage versus that of the current one. If they are correlated very well, that means the shape-gain VQ contributes very little to the process and hence can be eliminated. On the other hand, if it does not correlate very well the contribution from the codebook is important hence the index shall be kept and used.

WO 97/15046 PCT/US96/16693 7 Other techniques such as stopping the search when an adaptively predetermined error threshold has been reached, and asymptotic searches are means of speeding up the search process and settling with a sub-optimal result. The heuristically-processed signal 138 is used as a control for the coding process 110 to further improve the coding technique.

This general kind of filtering processing is well known in the art, and it should be understood that the present invention includes improvements on the well known filtering systems in the art.

The coding according to the present invention uses the codebook types and architecture shown in Figure 2.

0* i This coding includes three separate codebooks: adaptive 15 vector quantatization (VQ) codebook 200, real pitch codebook 202, and noise codebook 204. The new information, or residual 104, is used as a residual to subtract from the code vector of the subsequent block.

ZSR (Zero state response) is a response with zero input.

20 The ZSR is a response produced when the code vector is all zeros. Since the speech filter and other associated filters are IIR (infinite impulse response) filters, even when there is no input, the system will still generate output continuously. Thus, a reasonable first step for codebook searching is to determine whether it is necessary to perform any more searches, or perhaps no code vector is needed for this subframe.

To clarify this point, any prior event will have a residual effect. Although that effect will diminish as time passes, the effect is still present well into the next adjacent sub-frames or even frames. Therefore, the speech model must take these into consideration. If the speech signal present in the current frame is just a residual effect from a previous frame, then the perceptually-weighted error signal E 0 will be very low or WO 97115046 PCT/US96/16693 8 even be zero. Note that, because of noise or other system issues, all-zero error conditions will almost never occur.

e, STAres The reason 0 vector is used is for completeness to indicate zero state response. This is a set-up condition for searches to be taken place. If E0 is zero, or approaches zero, then no new vectors are necessary.

EO is used -to drive the next stage as the "target" of matching for the next stage. The objective is to find a vector such that El is very close to or equal to zero, where El is the perceptually weighted error from el, and Sel is the difference between eO-vector(i). This process goes on and on through the various stages.

15 The preferred mode of the present invention uses a preferred system with 240 samples per.frame. There are four subframes per frame, meaning that each subframe has samples.

A VQ search for each subframe is done. This VQ 20 search involves matching the 60-part vector with vectors in a codebook using a conventional vector matching system.

Each of these vectors must be defined according to an equation. The basic equation used is of the form that 25 GaAi GBB GCk.

Since the objective is to come up with a minimum perceptually weighted error signal E3 by selecting vectors Ai, Bj, and Ck along with the corresponding gain Ga, Gb, and Gc. This does NOT imply the vector sum of GbB, GCCE STAres.

In fact, it is almost never true with the exception of silence.

The error value E 0 is preferably matched to the values in the AVQ codebook 200. This is a conventional WO 97/15046 PCTUS96/i6693 9 kind of codebook where samples of previous reconstructed speech, the last 20 ms, is stored. A closest match is found. The value e, (error signal number 1) represents the leftover between the matching of E, with AVQ 200.

According to the present invention, the adaptive vector quantizer stores a 20 ms history of the reconstructed speech. This history is mostly for pitch prediction during voice frame. The pitch of a sound signal does not change quickly. The new signal will be closer to those values in the AVQ than they will to other things. Therefore, a close match is usually expected.

Changes in voice, however, or new users entering a conversation, will degrade the quality of the matching.

SAccording to the present invention, this degraded 15 matching is compensated using other codebooks.

The second codebook used according to the present invention is a real pitch codebook 202. This real pitch codebook includes code entries for the most usual pitches. The new pitches represent most possible pitches 20 of human voices, preferably from 200 Hz down. The coo purpose of this second codebook is to match to a new speaker and for startup/voice attack purposes. The pitch codebook is intended for fast attack when voice starts or when a new person entering the room with new pitch information not found in the adaptive codebook or the socalled history codebook. Such a fast attack method allows the shape of speech to converge more quickly and allows matches more closely to that of the original waveform during the voice region.

Usually when a new speaker enters the sound field, AVQ will have a hard time performing the matching.

Hence, El is still very high. During this initial time, therefore, there are large residuals, because the matching in the codebook is very poor. The residual E, represents the new speaker's pitch weighted error. This WO 97/15046 I'CT/US96/16693 10 residual is matched to the pitch in the real pitch codebook 202.

The conventional method uses some form of random pulse codebook which is slowly shaped via the adaptive process in 200 to match that of the original speech.

This method takes too long to converge. Typically it takes about 6 sub-frames and causes major distortion around the voice attack region and hence suffers quality loss.

The inventors have found that this matching to the pitch codebook 202 causes an almost immediate re-locking of the signal. For example, the signal might be relocked in a single period, where one sub-frame period S. 60 samples 60/8000 7.5ms. This allows accurate S 15 representation of the new voice during the transitional period in the early part of the time while the new speaker is talking.

The noise codebook 204 is used to pick up the slack and also help shape speech during the unvoiced 20 period.

As described above, the G's represent amplitude adjustment characteristics, and A, B and C are vectors.

The codebook for the AVQ preferably includes 256 entries. The codebooks for the pitch and noise each include 512 entries.

The system of the present invention uses three codebooks. However, it should be understood that either the real pitch codebook or the noise codebook could be used without the other.

Additional processing is carried out according to the present invention under the characteristic called heuristics. As described above, the three-part codebook of the present invention improves the efficiency of matching. However, this of course is only done at the expense of more transmitted information and hence less WO 97/15046 I PCT7US96/lI 693 11 compression efficiency. Moreover, the advantageous architecture of the present invention allows viewing and processing each of the error values e 0 and E 0 These error values tell us various things about the signals, including the degree of matching. For example, the error value E 0 being 0 tells us that no additional processing is necessary. Similar information can be obtained from errors Eo-E,. According to the present invention, the system determines the degree of mismatching to the codebook, to obtain an indication of whether the real pitch and noise codebooks are necessary. Real pitch and noise codebooks are not always used. These codebooks are only used when some new kind or character of sound enters the field.

15 The codebooks are adaptively switched in and out based on a calculation carried out with the output of the codebook.

The preferred technique compares E 0 to Since the values are vectors, the comparison requires 20 correlating the two vectors. Correlating two vectors ascertains the degree of closeness therebetween. The result of the correlation is a scalar value that indicates how good the match is. If the correlation value is low, it indicates that these vectors are very different. This implies the contribution from this codebook is significant, therefore, no additional codebook searching steps are necessary. On the contrary, if the correlation value is high, the contribution from this codebook is not needed, then further processings are required. Accordingly, this aspect of the invention compares the two error values to determine if additional codebook compensation is necessary. If not, the additional codebook compensation is turned off to increase the compression.

WO 97/15046 PCT/US96/16693 12 A similar operation can be carried out between E, and E, to determine if the noise codebook is necessary.

Moreover, those having ordinary skill in the art will understand that this can be modified other ways using the general technique that a determination of whether the coding is sufficient is obtained, and the codebooks are adaptively switched in or out to further improve the compression rate and/or matching.

Additional heuristics are also used according to the present invention to speed up the search. Additional heuristics to speed up codebook searches are: a) a subset of codebooks is searched and a partial perceptually weighted error Ex is determined. If Ex is Swithin a certain predetermined threshold, matching is 15 stopped and decided to be good enough. Otherwise we search through the end. Partial selection can.be done randomly, or through decimated sets.

b) An asymptotic way of computing the perceptually weighted error is used whereby computation is simplified.

20 c) Totally skip the perceptually weighted error criteria and minimize instead. In such case, an early-out algorithm is available to further speed up the computation.

Another heuristic is the voice or unvoice detection and its appropriate processing. The voice/unvoice can be determined during preprocessing.

Detection is done, for example, based on zero crossings and energy determinations. The processing of these sounds is done differently depending on whether the input sound is voice or unvoice. For example, codebooks can be switched in depending on which codebook is effective.

Different codebooks can be used for different purposes, including but not limited to the well known technique of shape gain vector quantatization and join optimization. An increase in the overall compression WO 97/15046 PCTrUS96/16693 13 rate is obtainable based on preprocessing and switching in and out the codebooks.

Although only a few embodiments have been described in detail above, those having ordinary skill in the art will certainly understand that many modifications are possible in the preferred embodiment without departing from the teachings thereof.

All such modifications are intended to be encompassed within the following claims.

**o o

Claims (16)

1. A sound compression system for generating a compressed sound output, comprising: a first processing element structured and arranged to characterize a first sound representation and to generate first characterization results; a second processing element structured and arranged to characterize a second sound representation and to generate second characterization results; and a first comparison element structured and arranged to perform a first comparison that compares a first comparison input related to the first sound representation with a second comparison input related to the second sound representation and to determine contents of the compressed sound output based on whether a first comparison result satisfies a first predetermined threshold criteria. ooooo

2. The system as in claim wherein the compressed sound output includes the second characterization results only where the first comparison result satisfies the first S' predetermined threshold. The system as in claim wherein the compressed sound output may be limited to the second characterization results when the first comparison result satisfies the first predetermined threshold.

4. The system as in claim wherein the first processing element comprises a first codebook which includes first codes for characterizing the first sound representation, and the second processing element comprises a second codebook which includes codes for characterizing the second sound representation. USSN 09/710,877 The system as in claim 4, wherein the second codebook includes at least one code that differs from the codes of the first codebook.

6. The system as in claim 4, wherein the first and second characterization results each comprise an indication of a closest matching code and a residual.

7. The system as in claim 1, wherein the first sound representation and the second sound representation comprise perceptually weighted error values.

8. The system as in claim 7 wherein the first comparison input and the second comparison input used for comparison by the first comparison element comprise i "'"perceptually weighted error values. S 9. The system as in claim wherein the first comparison input and the second comparison input used for comparison by the first comparison element comprise non- perceptually weighted error values. The system as in claim 1, wherein the first comparison element performs a correlation function upon the first comparison input and the second comparison input, and the first comparison result is a correlation metric value.

11. The system as in claim 1, further comprising: a third processing element structured and arranged to characterize a third sound representation and to generate third characterization results; and a second comparison element structured and arranged to perform a second comparison that compares the second comparison input related to the second sound representation and a third comparison input related to the third sound representation and 16 USSN 09/710,877 to determine the contents of the compressed sound output based on whether a second comparison result satisfies a second predetermined threshold criteria.

12. The system as in claim 11, wherein the compressed sound output includes the third characterization results only where the second comparison result satisfies the second predetermined threshold.

13. The system as in claim 11, wherein the compressed sound output may be limited to the third characterization results when the second comparison result satisfies the second predetermined threshold.

14. The system as in claimll ,wherein: the first processing element comprises an adaptive vector quantization codebook; the second processing element comprises a real pitch vector quantization codebook which includes a plurality of pitches indicative of voices; and the third processing element comprises a noise vector quantization codebook .which includes a plurality of noise vectors. The system as in claim 1 wherein the first sound representation comprises the difference between a first received value indicative of a previous sound, and a second ,e received value indicative of a new sound.

16. The system as in claim 11, wherein the second comparison element compares the second comparison input and the third comparison input only when the first comparison satisfies the first predetermined threshold.

17. The system as in claim 11, wherein the first sound representation characterized by the first processing element comprises a perceptually weighted 17 USSN 091710v977 17 difference between a first received value indicative of a previous sound and a second received value indicative of a new sound.

18. The system as in claim 17, wherein the sound representation characterized by the second processing element comprises a perceptually weighted residual of the first processing element; and wherein the third sound representation characterized by the third processing element comprises a perceptually weighted residual of the second processing element.

19. A method of compressing sound, comprising: characterizing a first sound representation to produce first characterization results, the first characterization results including at least a first processing element residual; characterizing a second sound representation and producing second 9 characterization results indicative thereof, the second characterization results including at least a second processing element residual; and correlating a first comparison input related to the first sound representation with a second comparison input related to the second sound representation and determining the contents of the compressed sound output based on whether a first comparison result 9. .9 satisfies a first predetermined threshold criteria. 9999 The method of claim 19, wherein the compressed sound output includes the .9 second characterization results only where the first comparison result satisfies the first predetermined threshold criteria.

21. The system as in claim 1 9 wherein the compressed sound output is limited to the second characterization results when the first comparison result satisfies the first predetermined threshold.

40047558.doc Dated this 21st day of MARCH 2001 AMERICA ONLINE, INC. By their Patent Attorneys GRIFFITH HACK Fellows Institute of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys of Australia