A New Model-based Mandarin-speech Coding System

Abstract

In this paper, a new model-based Mandarin-speech coding system is proposed. It employs a prosody-enriched ASR with a hierarchical prosodic model (HPM) to generate from the input speech enriched transcriptions, including linguistic features, prosodic tags and spectral parameters in the encoder. By sending these features to the decoder, we can first reconstruct the prosodic-acoustic features of syllable pitch contour, syllable duration, syllable energy level, and inter-syllable pause duration by HPM using the linguistic features and prosodic tags; and then combined with spectral parameters to reconstruct the input speech signal by an HMM-based speech synthesizer. Experimental results show that the reconstructed speech has good quality at a low data rate of 543 bits/s.