Effects of Packet Losses in Waveform Coded Speech and Improvements Due to an Odd-Even Sample-Interpolation Procedure

We have studied the effects of random packet losses in digital speech systems based on 12-bit PCM and 4-bit adaptive DPCM coding. The effects are a function of packet length <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</tex> and probability of packet loss P <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">L</inf> . We have also studied tbe benefits of an odd-even sample-interpolation procedure that mitigates these effects (at the cost of increased decoding delay). The procedure is based on arranging a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2B</tex> -block of codewords into two <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</tex> -sample packets, an odd-sample packet and an even-sample packet. If one of these packets is lost, the odd (or even) samples of the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2B</tex> -block are estimated from the even (or odd) samples by means of adaptive interpolation. Perceptual considerations indicate that packet lengths most robust to losses are in the range 16-32 ms, irrespective of whether interpolation is used or not. With these packet lengths, tolerable P <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">L</inf> values, which are strictly input-speech-dependent, can be as high as 2 to 5 percent without interpolation and 5 to 10 percent with interpolation. These observations are based on a computer simulation with three sentence-length speech inputs, and on informal listening tests.