Project Title:

Loss-Tolerant Speech Coding for Manned Space Flight

92-1-06.05-5700B                                                  NAS09-18870
Loss-Tolerant Speech Coding for Manned Space
     Flight
Lincom Corporation
1020 Bay Area Boulevard, Suite 200
Houston, TX  77058
Jaime Prieto                                         (713-488-5700)

Abstract:

     Manned-space-flight speech communications are vital to ensure
mission success and crew safety. Mission goals are compromised
when speech communications are interrupted by environmental and
man-made noise on the space network. Noise can cause loss of
information and decoder failure in reproducing the original coded
speech. Conventional digital speech coding algorithms do not
maintain high-quality audio in the presence of information loss.
The goal of this project is to develop a real-time, loss-tolerant
speech coder for manned space flight where a high degree of speech
quality and intelligibility is maintained in the event of speech
data loss. Space-time neural network (STNN) technology in tracking
and predicting the time-frequency energy content of speech will be
incorporated as the first step of the project. The STNN
effectively models spatial-temporal relationships and the loss-
tolerant speech coder using STNN represents a breakthrough in
speech communications for manned space flight.

Potential Commercial Application:

Potential Commercial Applications:  Potential applications include
integration of speech communications with other services on packet
networks. The prime candidates for this technology are channel
sharing on telephone lines, meteor-burst speech transmission,
cellular telephones, aviation communications, and global satellite
communication networks.

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