We consider a new post-filtering algorithm for residual acoustic echo cancellation in hands-free application. The new post-filtering algorithm is composed of AR analysis, pitch prediction, and noise reduction algorithm. The residual acoustic echo is whitened via AR analysis and pitch prediction during no near-end talker period and then is cancelled by noise reduction algorithm. By removing speech characteristics of the residual acoustic echo, noise reduction algorithm reduces the power of the residual acoustic echo as well as the ambient noise. For the hands-free application in the moving car, the proposed system attenuated the interferences more than 15 dB at a constant speed of 80 km/h.

This paper proposes a new pitch prediction method for 4 kbps CELP (Code Excited LPC) speech coding with 20 msec frame, for the future ITU-T 4 kbps speech coding standardization. In the conventional CELP speech coding, synthetic speech quality deteriorates rapidly at 4 kbps, especially for female and children's speech with short pitch period. The pitch prediction performance is significantly degraded for such speech. The important reason is that when the pitch period is shorter than the subframe length, the simple repetition of the past excitation signal based on the estimated lag, not the pitch prediction, is usually carried out in the adaptive codebook operation. The proposed pitch prediction method can carry out the pitch prediction without the above approximation by utilizing the current subframe excitation codevector signal, when the pitch prediction parameters are determined. To further improve the performance, a split vector synthesis and perceptually spectral weighting method, and a low-complexity perceptually harmonic and spectral weighting method have also been developed. The informal listening test result shows that the 4 kbps speech coder with 20 msec frame, utilizing all of the proposed improvements, achieves 0.2 MOS higher results than the coder without them.