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

[Steve Kann]

Jean-Marc Valin wrote:
>> 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).
>   

I think you want to use both pieces of information, so you're not 
raising the level of a signal that's not speech.  It's _especially_ 
important when you're doing EC, of course, because you don't want to 
raise the gain on an echo.

>
>> 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.
>   
The thing is, I don't know if mixer controls on most platforms give you 
any idea of by how many dB you're changing things, whether the changes 
are linear or not, etc -- the mixer controls are just a know with levels 
from 0<->1 (mac, I think), 0-100, or 0-255.  I raise/lower them by 10% 
or 20% of their full range, so with the 10% adjustments, you only have 
10 steps.  That seemed a big enough jump in practice.

-SteveK



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