[Speex-dev] Google Summer of Code projects for Speex

[Jean-Marc Valin]

Hi students (non-students may skip this)!

As some of you may be aware, the deadline for the Google Summer of Code
(http://code.google.com/soc/) program is approaching quickly (March
24th). For those interested, there are two Speex-related projects
(below) and lots more in Xiph.Org in general (see
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Summer_of_Code). You can apply at
http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-announce/web/guide-to-the-gsoc-web-app-for-student-applicants

Cheers,

	Jean-Marc

*New vocoder for Speex*

This is a real speech coding project! Speex currently has a very low
bit-rate (2.15 kbps) mode that is implemented as a trivial vocoder. This
mode has four "reserved" bits per frame, which means it would be
possible to transmit more information. The idea of this project would be
to make use of these bits to improve the quality of the 2.15 kbps mode.
Changes to both the encoder and the decoder are allowed, provided that
they are compatible with older version. This means that the new
bit-stream should be decodable by the old decoder with only minor loss
in quality. This still leaves plenty of room for improvement. Upon
successful completion, there will be a new vocoder that can be merged
into the main Speex tree with improved quality and (non-exact) backward
compatibility with the previous vocoder. The project requires some
signal processing knowledge.

*New Speex VAD/VBR code*

The current Speex VAD/VBR code is a quick hack, put together a long time
ago. This project consists of rewriting it to perform much better under
all kinds of conditions. Performance criteria are: classification
accuracy, quality in VAD/DTX mode, simplicity, and of course speed. This
project involves pattern classification and speech processing, so it
requires at least some knowledge in these fields (or at least one of them).