Speech compression using wavelets

Abstract

With the growth of the multimedia and cellular technology over the past decades, the demand for digital information increases dramatically. This enormous demand poses difficulties for the current technology to handle speech compression. One approach to overcome this problem is to compress the information by removing the redundancies present in it. This is a lossy compression scheme that is often used to compress information such as speech signals. This paper presents a new lossy algorithm to compress speech signals using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) Techniques to solve the limited bandwidth problem facing the Palestinian cellular company, Jawwal. The performance of the DWT for speech compression is very good compared with other techniques such as µ-law speech coder. Moreover, the compression ratio using Wavelet can be varied easily, while other techniques have fixed one.