An improved background noise coding mode for variable rate speech coders

In this paper, we present a novel background noise coding scheme for variable rate speech coders. Existing approaches to noise coding at very low bit rates (i.e. below 1 kbps) fail to faithfully reproduce background noise resulting in a degradation of the overall perceptual quality. In our approach, classification of the noise type is used to select the type of excitation to be used at the receiver. To illustrate the benefits of our scheme, we have modified the noise coding mode of the CDMA enhanced variable rate codec (EVRC) to include the proposed class-dependent noise excitation model. Evaluation tests have shown that we have improved the overall quality with the proposed noise coding scheme without an increase in bit rate.