Neural Speech Coding for Real-time Communications using Constant Bitrate Scalar Quantization

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Brendel, Andreas, Pia, Nicola, Gupta, Kishan, Behringer, Lyonel, Fuchs, Guillaume, Multrus, Markus
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Brendel, Andreas
Pia, Nicola
Gupta, Kishan
Behringer, Lyonel
Fuchs, Guillaume
Multrus, Markus
author_facet Brendel, Andreas
Pia, Nicola
Gupta, Kishan
Behringer, Lyonel
Fuchs, Guillaume
Multrus, Markus
contents Neural audio coding has emerged as a vivid research direction by promising good audio quality at very low bitrates unachievable by classical coding techniques. Here, end-to-end trainable autoencoder-like models represent the state of the art, where a discrete representation in the bottleneck of the autoencoder is learned. This allows for efficient transmission of the input audio signal. The learned discrete representation of neural codecs is typically generated by applying a quantizer to the output of the neural encoder. In almost all state-of-the-art neural audio coding approaches, this quantizer is realized as a Vector Quantizer (VQ) and a lot of effort has been spent to alleviate drawbacks of this quantization technique when used together with a neural audio coder. In this paper, we propose and analyze simple alternatives to VQ, which are based on projected Scalar Quantization (SQ). These quantization techniques do not need any additional losses, scheduling parameters or codebook storage thereby simplifying the training of neural audio codecs. For real-time speech communication applications, these neural codecs are required to operate at low complexity, low latency and at low bitrates. We address those challenges by proposing a new causal network architecture that is based on SQ and a Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) representation. The proposed method performs particularly well in the very low complexity and low bitrate regime.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_08417
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Speech Coding for Real-time Communications using Constant Bitrate Scalar Quantization
Brendel, Andreas
Pia, Nicola
Gupta, Kishan
Behringer, Lyonel
Fuchs, Guillaume
Multrus, Markus
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
Neural audio coding has emerged as a vivid research direction by promising good audio quality at very low bitrates unachievable by classical coding techniques. Here, end-to-end trainable autoencoder-like models represent the state of the art, where a discrete representation in the bottleneck of the autoencoder is learned. This allows for efficient transmission of the input audio signal. The learned discrete representation of neural codecs is typically generated by applying a quantizer to the output of the neural encoder. In almost all state-of-the-art neural audio coding approaches, this quantizer is realized as a Vector Quantizer (VQ) and a lot of effort has been spent to alleviate drawbacks of this quantization technique when used together with a neural audio coder. In this paper, we propose and analyze simple alternatives to VQ, which are based on projected Scalar Quantization (SQ). These quantization techniques do not need any additional losses, scheduling parameters or codebook storage thereby simplifying the training of neural audio codecs. For real-time speech communication applications, these neural codecs are required to operate at low complexity, low latency and at low bitrates. We address those challenges by proposing a new causal network architecture that is based on SQ and a Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) representation. The proposed method performs particularly well in the very low complexity and low bitrate regime.
title Neural Speech Coding for Real-time Communications using Constant Bitrate Scalar Quantization
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08417