Standardization of the new 3GPP EVS codec

Abstract

A new codec for Enhanced Voice Services (EVS), the successor of the current mobile HD voice codec AMR-WB, was standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in September 2014. The EVS codec addresses 3GPP's needs for cutting-edge technology enabling operation of 3GPP mobile communication systems in the most competitive means in terms of communication quality and efficiency. This paper provides an in-depth insight into 3GPP's rigorous and transparent processes that made it possible for the mobile industry, with its many competing players, to successfully develop and standardize a codec in an open, fair and constructive process. This paper also enables an understanding of this achievement by providing an overview of the EVS codec technology, the standard specifications, and the performance of the codec that will elevate HD voice services to the next quality level

Ambisonic Coding with Spatial Image Correction

“…To illustrate this, we used here the publicly available VST plugin SPARTA [16] to generate the power map of the original, coded and post-processed signals. The ambisonic signal was encoded by multi-mono EVS [17] at n×16.4 kbit/s. It can be seen that multi-mono coding results in phantom sources and spatial alterations.…”

“…The proposed post-processing is designed to operate with any core codec. In this test we used two core codecs for multi-mono coding: EVS [17] and Opus [5]. With such low bitrate codecs, one cannot measure performance with objective metrics as SNR or MSE [19].…”

EVS Channel Aware Mode Robustness to Frame Erasures

“…The EVS codec is designed to be inherently robust to channel errors [3]. Further information about the EVS codec can be found from specification, and ICASSP and GlobalSIP special session papers [4] [5] [6] [7].…”

Temporal Tile Shaping for spectral gap filling in audio transform coding in EVS

“…To accommodate this, next generation audio codecs like 3GPP Enhanced Voice Service (EVS) [1,2,3] comprise transform coding functionality by TCX, alongside with tightly integrated parametric tools such as noise filling or spectral Intelligent Gap Filling (IGF), as initially standardized within MPEG-H 3D-Audio [4].…”