Hybrid Source-Channel Coding with Bandwidth Expansion for Speech Data

Hybrid digital-analog (HDA) architectures have been widely developed for efficient digital transmission of analog speech, audio or video data. By considering the advantage of both digital and analog components, HDA systems gain better performances than purely analog and digital schemes in a wide range of channel conditions. However, HDA systems described in previous works are mostly designed for continuous-valued sources. In this paper, we address the problem of transmission of discrete sources over noisy channels. In particular, our work focuses on digital speech data in PCM format. We proposed two analog schemes, linear mapping, and non-linear mappings. The linear analog mapping employs an equal error protection scheme while the non-linear mapping takes into account the heterogeneous nature of error values to provide better protection to important values. The experiment results show that our HDA systems provide a better performance on a wide range of channel qualities in comparison with traditional purely digital systems.