A Practical Handbook of Speech Coders offers in-depth treatment of the basics of speech coding plus the innovations to the basic methods that make the coders useful and efficient. It describes the fundamentals of auditory information processing and how they relate to speech coding, and shows readers how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of all publicly available codes and choose the right one. It explains how to measure the quality of speech coders with objective, subjective, and perceptual measures. The book also shows engineers how to tailor existing speech coders and provides the building blocks to create new coders.

A Practical Handbook of Speech Coders offers in-depth treatment of the basics of speech coding plus the innovations to the basic methods that make the coders useful and efficient. It describes the fundamentals of auditory information processing and how they relate to speech coding, and shows readers how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of all publicly available codes and choose the right one. It explains how to measure the quality of speech coders with objective, subjective, and perceptual measures. The book also shows engineers how to tailor existing speech coders and provides the building blocks to create new coders.

The demand for digital speech coding algorithms grows every day, fueled by applications such as streaming speech over the Internet, Internet telephone, digital cellular telephony, wireless teleconferencing, and various multimedia applications. Until now, most of the books available on audio coding have been collections of individually authored papers. Others have discussed the fundamental coders, but neglected many of the innovations currently in use. Unlike these books, A Practical Handbook of Speech Coders offers in-depth treatment of the basics of speech coding plus the innovations to the basic methods that make the coders useful and efficient. The authors designed this work for engineers, scientists, and manager who need to understand the emerging speech coding techniques and telecommunication standards. However, it will prove useful to people at all levels of speech coder experience: If you want to simply download the code for an existing algorithm, this book helps you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of all publicly available codes and choose the right one, then points you to the Internet location where the code is available for download. For experts who want to improve on existing coders, this book provides the parameters of current coders and the techniques to improve upon them. You can download an existing algorithm or code it using the algorithmic descriptions in the book, make your innovations, and then test the code with the procedures given. If you want to become an expert and have some basic knowledge of digital signal processing, you can learn the innovative steps taken by the inventor of each coder, explore the rigorous research techniques needed to develop your own coder, and become proficient in existing vocoder technology.

Speech coding is a highly mature branch of signal processing deployed in products such as cellular phones, communication devices, and more recently, voice over internet protocol This book collects many of the techniques used in speech coding and presents them in an accessible fashion Emphasizes the foundation and evolution of standardized speech coders, covering standards from 1984 to the present The theory behind the applications is thoroughly analyzed and proved

It is becoming increasingly apparent that all forms of communication-including voice-will be transmitted through packet-switched networks based on the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the design of modern devices that rely on speech interfaces, such as cell phones and PDAs, requires a complete and up-to-date understanding of the basics of speech

Widely considered one of the best practical guides to programming, Steve McConnell’s original CODE COMPLETE has been helping developers write better software for more than a decade. Now this classic book has been fully updated and revised with leading-edge practices—and hundreds of new code samples—illustrating the art and science of software construction. Capturing the body of knowledge available from research, academia, and everyday commercial practice, McConnell synthesizes the most effective techniques and must-know principles into clear, pragmatic guidance. No matter what your experience level, development environment, or project size, this book will inform and stimulate your thinking—and help you build the highest quality code. Discover the timeless techniques and strategies that help you: Design for minimum complexity and maximum creativity Reap the benefits of collaborative development Apply defensive programming techniques to reduce and flush out errors Exploit opportunities to refactor—or evolve—code, and do it safely Use construction practices that are right-weight for your project Debug problems quickly and effectively Resolve critical construction issues early and correctly Build quality into the beginning, middle, and end of your project

Hardbound. The fields of speech coding and synthesis have developed rapidly over the last decade. Text-to-text speech systems now produce reasonable quality speech, and currently available speech coders can transmit good quality speech at below 10kb/s. This, in combination with the ever-increasing speed of microprocessors and signal processing hardware, has resulted in a large number of practical applications. These applications in turn have stimulated research, and the number of papers published on speech coding and synthesis have proliferated rapidly. Reflecting periodically on such developments have inspired the publication of this book. Topics such as the effect of cross channel errors on coded speech and the determination of a proper pitch contour for synthesized speech are included.Both readers unfamiliar with the fields of speech coding and speech synthesis as well as those already working within the areas, will find the book of interest.

"Ultra Low Bit-Rate Speech Coding" focuses on the specialized topic of speech coding at very low bit-rates of 1 Kbits/sec and less, particularly at the lower ends of this range, down to 100 bps. The authors set forth the fundamental results and trends that form the basis for such ultra low bit-rates to be viable and provide a comprehensive overview of various techniques and systems in literature to date, with particular attention to their work in the paradigm of unit-selection based segment quantization. The book is for research students, academic faculty and researchers, and industry practitioners in the areas of speech processing and speech coding.

The Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry is intended as a reference book fully accessible to nonspecialists as well as specialists, covering all major aspects of both fields. The book offers the most important results and methods in discrete and computational geometry to those who use them in their work, both in the academic world—as researchers in mathematics and computer science—and in the professional world—as practitioners in fields as diverse as operations research, molecular biology, and robotics. Discrete geometry has contributed significantly to the growth of discrete mathematics in recent years. This has been fueled partly by the advent of powerful computers and by the recent explosion of activity in the relatively young field of computational geometry. This synthesis between discrete and computational geometry lies at the heart of this Handbook. A growing list of application fields includes combinatorial optimization, computer-aided design, computer graphics, crystallography, data analysis, error-correcting codes, geographic information systems, motion planning, operations research, pattern recognition, robotics, solid modeling, and tomography.