VoiceAge (Canada)

de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

A new codec for Enhanced Voice Services (EVS), the successor of the current mobile HD voice codec AMR-WB, was standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in September 2014. The EVS codec addresses 3GPP's needs for cutting-edge technology enabling operation of 3GPP mobile communication systems in the most competitive means in terms of communication quality and efficiency. This paper provides an in-depth insight into 3GPP's rigorous and transparent processes that made it possible for the mobile industry, with its many competing players, to successfully develop and standardize a codec in an open, fair and constructive process. This paper also enables an understanding of this achievement by providing an overview of the EVS codec technology, the standard specifications, and the performance of the codec that will elevate HD voice services to the next quality level.

This paper presents high quality monaural superwideband extensions to G.711.1 and G.722, recently standardized as Recommendations ITU-T G.711.1 Annex D and G.722 Annex B. The superwideband (50-14000 Hz) functionality is achieved using embedded scalable structure that adds extension layers on top of the wideband core codecs. The bit rates are extended to 96/112/128 and 64/80/96 kbit/s for G.711.1 and G.722, respectively. The main technologies include lower and higher band (0-4 kHz and 4-8 kHz) enhancements, 8-14 kHz bandwidth extension and transform coding based on algebraic vector quantization. The codecs' performance is illustrated with listening test results extracted from formal ITU-T Characterization tests.

ITU-T has selected the candidate submitted by Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, VoiceAge, and Texas Instruments as the baseline for the G.EV-VBR coding standard. G.EV-VBR is an embedded scalable speech codec that uses state-of-the-art technology to provide the most efficient encoded speech available for various real-time applications. EV-VBR encodes both narrowband (NB) and wideband (WB) speech signals starting at 8 kbps. Near perfect wideband representation is achieved at 32 kbps for all signal types. The bit stream is divided into five robust layers, providing sufficient granularity, in particular for VoIP applications. In addition, an extension to the codec will provide super- wideband and stereo capability by adding layers to the codec. Extensive listening tests were conducted during the ITU-T selection phase to support selection of the best- performing candidate. The selected EV-VBR candidate passed 69 of 70 required and 25 of 28 objective terms of reference.