ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

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

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

Recently, neural networks have proven to be effective in performing speech coding task at low bitrates. However, underutilization 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 Beamsearch 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.