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Efficient Algorithm and Architecture of Critical-Band Transform for Low-Power Speech Applications

EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing volume 2007, Article number: 089264 (2007) Cite this article

Abstract

An efficient algorithm and its corresponding VLSI architecture for the critical-band transform (CBT) are developed to approximate the critical-band filtering of the human ear. The CBT consists of a constant-bandwidth transform in the lower frequency range and a Brown constant- transform (CQT) in the higher frequency range. The corresponding VLSI architecture is proposed to achieve significant power efficiency by reducing the computational complexity, using pipeline and parallel processing, and applying the supply voltage scaling technique. A 21-band Bark scale CBT processor with a sampling rate of 16 kHz is designed and simulated. Simulation results verify its suitability for performing short-time spectral analysis on speech. It has a better fitting on the human ear critical-band analysis, significantly fewer computations, and therefore is more energy-efficient than other methods. With a 0.35m CMOS technology, it calculates a 160-point speech in 4.99 milliseconds at 234 kHz. The power dissipation is 15.6W at 1.1 V. It achieves 82.1 power reduction as compared to a benchmark 256-point FFT processor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Signal Processing, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore

    Chao Wang

  2. Digital Signal Processing Lab, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore

    Chao Wang & Woon-Seng Gan

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  1. Chao Wang
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  2. Woon-Seng Gan
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Correspondence to Chao Wang.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Wang, C., Gan, WS. Efficient Algorithm and Architecture of Critical-Band Transform for Low-Power Speech Applications. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2007, 089264 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/89264

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