This book provides scientific understanding of the most central techniques used in speech coding both for advanced students as well as professionals with a background in speech audio and or digital signal processing. It provides a clear connection between the Why’s?, How’s?, and What’s, such that the necessity, purpose and solutions provided by tools should be always within sight, as well as their strengths and weaknesses in each respect. Equivalently, this book sheds light on the following perspectives for each technology presented:

Objective

What do we want to achieve and especially why is this goal important?

Resource / Information

What information is available and how can it be useful?

Resource / Platform

What kind of platforms are we working with and what are the capabilities/restrictions of those platforms? This includes properties such as computational, memory, acoustic and transmission capacity of devices used.

Solutions

Which solutions have been proposed and how can they be used to reach the stated goals?

Strengths and weaknesses

In which ways do the solutions fulfill the objectives and where are they insufficient? Are resources used efficiently?

This book concentrates solely on code excited linear prediction and its derivatives since mainstream speech codecs are based on linear prediction. It also concentrates exclusively on time domain techniques because frequency domain tools are to a large extent common with audio codecs.