[Speex-dev] Re: [Iaxclient-devel] iaxclient & speex

[Jean-Marc Valin]

> I hate to be a talker and not a do-er, but I won't be able to write this
> myself, probably someone on the iaxclient team could do it.

Anyway, let me know if/when someone's working on that.

>> Hmm, or does that mean the analogue AGC is actually completely
>> independent from the "real" AGC. Any thoughts?
>>   
> 
> It's actually a bit more complicated, because it's more like "AEC ->
> Noise Suppressor -> VAD -> AGC", even if the VAD decision isn't used by
> the consumer, right.  Because the VAD decision needs to be used by AGC,
> so that it isn't raising the gain of background noise (although it
> should probably lower the gain when there's any signal higher than it's
> threshold).
> 
> For AAGC, though, I guess one way to do this would be if you could
> somehow "transport" the un-cancelled, un-noise-suppressed energy level
> past the VAD decision, and then used that to determine what gain
> adjustments to make.  In this fashion, you'd be making your adjustments
> based on the information you want:  (a) the actual signal energy before
> processing, and (b) VAD decision. 

I don't see b) as being that important. Could help a bit, but you really
want to use a).

> You might be able to fake it good enough by putting AAGC before AEC, and
> using the VAD decison from frame "n-1" when you're processing frame
> "n".  You'll probably have enough hysteresis and a bit of history in the
> decision making process anyway that it might not matter.

sure.

> As far as gain changes messing up the rest of the preprocessing chain: 
> It would seem to mess up the denoiser, the VAD logic, etc., as well as
> the echo canceller.  It might be possible (as I wrote earlier) to give
> the filter chain some hints about what the effects of the changes are,
> but it probably won't be perfect, because it would be difficult or
> impossible to predict the exact response of gain adjustments, and the
> delay after which they will actually take effect.

Well, I guess you could:
1) say "freeze!" to everyone
2) increase the analogue gain
3) let everyone know by how much the gain was increased
4) wait a little while (e.g. 100 ms)
5) unfreeze everyone

> The AAGC mechanism I implemented, though, was good enough, for some
> measure of good enough.  It basically made step-wise adjustments (10% or
> 20%) every so often, when speex' loudness parameter was above or below
> certain thresholds, and it strongly detected speech.  If you use this
> mechanism, and pre-set the mixers to be at about 80%, it relatively
> quickly gets the gain into a reasonable place once speech is detected. 
> It would probably work just as well when EC is involved, as long as EC
> and VAD work together well enough such that you don't get VAD
> false-positives from echo.  The target "loudness" range here is 4000 <->
> 8000, but it could be widened a bit to avoid more adjustments.

You don't want to make small +-10% adjustments. I would go for +-10 dB
at *least* (probably even 20 dB). Quantization noise issues at 16 bits
per sample aren't worth the trouble of doing smaller steps.

	Jean-Marc