# Low Bit-Rate Wideband Speech Coding: A Deep Generative Model based Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02640 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02640/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06711/) (2019)
- [WaveGlow: A Flow-based Generative Network for Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00002/) (2018)
- [LPCNet: Improving Neural Speech Synthesis Through Linear Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11846/) (2018)
- [Low Bit-Rate Speech Coding with VQ-VAE and a WaveNet Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06464/) (2019)
- [High-quality speech coding with SampleRNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03021/) (2018)
- [Source coding of audio signals with a generative model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09847/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditional low bit-rate speech coding approach only handles narrowband speech at 8kHz, which limits further improvements in speech quality. Motivated by recent successful exploration of deep learning methods for image and speech compression, this paper presents a new approach through vector quantization (VQ) of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and using a deep generative model called WaveGlow to provide efficient and high-quality speech coding. The coding feature is sorely an 80-dimension MFCCs vector for 16kHz wideband speech, then speech coding at the bit-rate throughout 1000-2000 bit/s could be scalably implemented by applying different VQ schemes for MFCCs vector. This new deep generative network based codec works fast as the WaveGlow model abandons the sample-by-sample autoregressive mechanism. We evaluated this new approach over the multi-speaker TIMIT corpus, and experimental results demonstrate that it provides better speech quality compared with the state-of-the-art classic MELPe codec at lower bit-rate.