In this paper, a novel approach to speech reinforcement in a low-bit-rate speech coder under ambient noise environments is proposed. The excitation vector of ambient noise is efficiently obtained at the near-end and then combined with the excitation signal of the far-end for a suitable reinforcement gain within the G.729 CS-ACELP Annex. B framework. For this reason, this can be clearly different from previous approaches in that the present approach does not require an additional arithmetic step such as the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Experimental results indicate that the proposed method shows better performance than or at least comparable to conventional approaches with a lower computational burden.

A number of results on the estimation of direction of arrival have been obtained based on the assumption that the signal sources are point sources. Recently, it has been shown that signal source localization can be accomplished more adequately with distributed source models in some real surroundings. In this paper, we consider modeling of three-dimensional distributed signal sources, in which a source location is represented by the center angles and degrees of dispersion. We address estimation of the elevation and azimuth angles of distributed sources based on the proposed distributed source modeling in the three-dimensional space using two linear arrays. Some examples are included to more explicitly show the estimation procedures under the model: numerical results obtained by a MUSIC-based method with two uniform linear arrays are discussed.