The Path to Mobile HD-Audio Communication

Voice telephony will remain a key service in mobile communication networks. As the audio frequency range is today still limited to the traditional telephone-bandwidth of about 3.4 kHz, there is a high potential to improve the audio quality and the speech intelligibility. Recent developments in speech-audio coding for HD-telephony (at least 7.0 kHz) and binaural telephony with spatial perception are presented. In the long transition period from today’s narrowband telephony to future voice audio communication, the acceptance of the new mobile HD-phones can be supported by artificial bandwidth extension, which is a mixture of pattern recognition, statistical estimation and speech synthesis. A particularly interesting variant is the bandwidth extension that works with methods of steganography (digital watermark technology).

Furthermore it is shown that, by iterative source-channel decoding, the improved audio quality can be ensured even on highly disturbed mobile radio channels. The different concepts of coding, artificial bandwidth extension and iterative error protection will be explained and demonstrated by audio examples.

Speaker Details

Peter Vary received the Dipl.- Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, in 1972 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany, in 1978.

In 1980, he joined Philips Communication Industries (PKI), Nuremberg, Germany, where he became head of the Digital Signal Processing Group. Since 1988, he has been a Professor at RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, and head of the Institute of Communication Systems and Data Processing.

His main research interests are digital wireless communications, including speech coding, joint source-channel coding, error concealment, and speech enhancement. Peter Vary is a Fellow of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Series:
Microsoft Research Talks
Date:
Speakers:
Peter Vary
Affiliation:
RWTH Aachen University

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Series: Microsoft Research Talks