G.718: A New Embedded Speech and Audio Coding Standard with High Resilience to Error-Prone Transmission Channels

This article is an overview of the standardization, architecture, and performance of the new ITU-T Recommendation G.718. G.718 is an embedded variable bit rate codec providing a scalable solution for compression of 8 and 16 kHz sampled speech and audio signals at rates between 8 kb/s and 32 kb/s. It comprises five layers where higher-layer bitstreams can be discarded without affecting the lower layersiquest decoding. The codec also has an optional core layer interoperable with ITU-T G.722.2 (3GPP AMR-WB) at 12.65 kb/s. G.718 was designed to provide high speech quality at low bit rates and to be robust to significant rates of frame erasures or packet losses. It is also targeting good quality for generic audio at higher rates.