The management of ITU-T Study Group 16 Working Party 3 (Media Coding) has organized a Special Session - New ITU-T Audio and Speech Coding Standards within the sixteenth European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO-2008) hosted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL).

The session will be chaired by Herv� Taddei (Rapporteur of Q23/16, “media coding”) and it will be complemented by a broad overview of ITU-T speech and audio coding standards that will be given in a plenary session presentation highlighting the audio and speech coding achievements in recent years and the main trends for the next four years.

EUSIPCO Conferences focus on the key aspects of signal processing theory and applications, and the exploration of new avenues and methodologies in signal processing.

The focus of the Special Session is on details of recent (mid 2007- early 2008) ITU-T speech and audio coding standards. In order to cope with the heterogeneity of access technologies adopted to interconnect various networks and terminals and to provide a universal and convergent multimedia access to users, audio coding development has been driven by three objectives: quality enhancement, flexibility improvements and increases in robustness.

VoIP over broadband has driven the development of strongly enhanced voice and audio services requiring new encoding capabilities. The capability to extend the encoded audio bandwidth from narrowband to wideband, superwideband and eventually fullband for a wide range of bit rates, with a high QoS is becoming a key issue. Scalable codecs capable of interoperating over such various sets of bit rates and bandwidths bring significant improvement.

Meanwhile, the work on development of additional features (Voice Activity Detector, Discontinuous transmission, Packet Loss Concealment procedure,) necessary to accommodate current coders to new application requirements and new IP packet networks constraints has continued and been reinforced.

• Present an integrated view of recent developments in speech and audio coding standards
• Increase cooperation between ITU-T and academia for audio and speech coding
• Raise visibility of ITU and its standards setting environment with academia and research organizations

• ITU-T G.711 wideband extension
• Enhancements to ITU-T G.729.1 wideband speech codec
• New ITU-T embedded variable bit rate codec
• Testing methodologies for fullband audio

Paper proposals are invited for the Special Session and should be submitted within the general framework of the EUSIPCO 2008 (indicating submission to this special session); deadline for paper submission is 20 February 2008. [ more … ]