An Intra-BRNN and GB-RVQ Based END-TO-END Neural Audio Codec

Author:

Linping Xu, Jiawei Jiang, Dejun Zhang, Xianjun Xia, Li Chen, Yijian Xiao, Piao Ding, Shenyi Song, Sixing Yin, Ferdous Sohel

Keyword:

Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, Audio and Speech Processing, Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS), Sound (cs.SD)

journal:

date:

2024-02-02 00:00:00

Abstract

Recently, neural networks have proven to be effective in performing speech coding task at low bitrates. However, under-utilization of intra-frame correlations and the error of quantizer specifically degrade the reconstructed audio quality. To improve the coding quality, we present an end-to-end neural speech codec, namely CBRC (Convolutional and Bidirectional Recurrent neural Codec). An interleaved structure using 1D-CNN and Intra-BRNN is designed to exploit the intra-frame correlations more efficiently. Furthermore, Group-wise and Beam-search Residual Vector Quantizer (GB-RVQ) is used to reduce the quantization noise. CBRC encodes audio every 20ms with no additional latency, which is suitable for real-time communication. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed codec when comparing CBRC at 3kbps with Opus at 12kbps.

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