Strictly Confidential Technical Documentation Open AMR Initiative

Open AMR Initiative

AMR Codec

Technical Documentation
Version 2.0, Revision A
July 2007

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© Copyright 2007 VoiceAge Corporation

VoiceAge Corporation
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Telephone: (514) 737-4940
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www.voiceage.com

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Contents
Revision history .........................................................................................4
References..................................................................................................4
The AMR codec ..........................................................................................5
Package contents.......................................................................................6
Data input/output format ...........................................................................7
Discontinuous Transmission (DTX) .........................................................9
About the Encoder/Decoder Sample Programs ....................................10
Usage of the encoder ..............................................................................................................10
Usage of the decoder ..............................................................................................................10
Building the sample programs.................................................................................................10
AMR API functions...................................................................................11
E_IF_init ..................................................................................................................................11
E_IF_encode ...........................................................................................................................11
E_IF_exit .................................................................................................................................11
D_IF_init ..................................................................................................................................12
D_IF_decode...........................................................................................................................12
D_IF_exit .................................................................................................................................12

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Revision history
July 2007 Updated descriptive text, frame bitmap table, references and document template.

July 2004 Second release.

July 2002 First release of this document.

References
[1] 3GPP 1999 TS 26.071, “AMR speech Codec; General description.”
http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/26071.htm

[2] 3GPP TS 26.104: “ANSI-C code for the floating-point Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) speech codec.”
http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/26104.htm

[3] IETF RFC 3267, “RTP payload format and file storage format for the Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR)
Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) audio codecs,” March 2002.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3267.txt

[4] 3GPP 1999 TS 26.101, “AMR Narrowband Speech Codec; Frame Structure.”
http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/26101.htm

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The AMR codec

VoiceAge’s AMR is an adaptive multi-rate narrowband speech codec with eight bit rate modes ranging
from 4.75 kbps to 12.2 kbps and an additional low-bit-rate background noise mode. The codec includes a
voice activity detector, a comfort noise generator and an error concealment mechanism, all of which
improve speech quality over lossy transmission mediums. For a general description, please see [1].

The implementation provided in this package is the AMR floating-point speech encoder and fast fixed-
point speech decoder. The encoder produces output that is compatible with the AMR-NB IF2 format. The
decoder is bit-exact with 3GPP TS 26.104 [2].

The RTP payload format defined in [3] enables the use of AMR in RTP packet-switched networks in
applications like streaming and provides interoperability with existing codec transport formats on non-IP
networks.

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Package contents
These files are included in the AMR Open Initiative package.
AMR-NB.pdf This document.
AMR-NB.lib Win32 statically linkable library of AMR-NB floating-point encoder/
fixed-point decoder for Pentium and compatible processors.
encoder.c Source code for encoder test program.
decoder.c Source code for decoder test program.
interf_enc.h Header files needed to compile encoder and decoder test programs.
interf_dec.h
typedef.h

encoder.exe Encoder test program executable.

decoder.exe Decoder test program executable.

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Data input/output format

Input to the encoder is in 16-bit pulse code modulation (PCM) speech data sampled at 8 kHz. The
decoder outputs the reconstructed speech data in the same format. Each input speech frame of 20 ms
consists of 160 16-bit PCM words containing 14-bit left-aligned uniform samples. The encoder outputs
compressed speech data in octet aligned (by using bit stuffing) AMR-NB Interface Format 2, as defined in
the 3GPP TS 26.101 [4].

Frame structure for AMR-NB IF2

Frame Type (4 bits)

AMR-NB Core Speech Frame

(size depends on bit rate mode)

Bit Stuffing (n bits)

An AMR-NB IF2 frame contains a header with a “Frame Type” field. The 4-bit “Frame Type” field identifies
the current frame as either an AMR-NB codec mode, comfort noise or an empty frame. The AMR-NB core
frame is the compressed speech data or comfort noise data within a 20-ms frame. The size of this data
depends on the current AMR-NB codec mode. The last field contains stuffing bits, which are necessary to
align the AMR-NB IF2 frame to the next multiple of eight. The following table shows the bit allocation for
AMR-NB IF2 frames.

Table 1. Total bits used for an AMR-NB IF2 frame

Frame Bit rate Frame AMR-NB Padding bits Total bytes

Type Index (kbps) type bits core bits per AMR-NB
IF2 frame
0 4.75 4 95 5 13
1 5.15 4 103 5 14
2 5.90 4 118 6 16
3 6.70 4 143 6 18
4 7.40 4 148 0 19
5 7.95 4 159 5 21
6 10.2 4 204 0 26
7 12.2 4 244 0 31
8 AMR SID* 4 39 5 6
9 GSM-EFR SID 4 39 1 6
10 TDMA-EFR SID 4 39 6 6
11 PDC-EFR SID 4 39 7 6
12-14 (for future use) - - - -
15 No data 4 0 4 1
*Bit rate of comfort noise (FT index 8) is 1.75 kbps when assuming continuous transmission.

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Table 2, based on table A.1a in [4], shows an example how the AMR 6.7-kbps mode is mapped into
AMR IF2. The four least significant bits (LSB) of the first octet (octet 1) consist of the Frame Type (=3) for
the AMR 6.7-kbps mode (see table 1a in [4]). This data field is followed by the 134 AMR core frame
speech bits (d(0)..d(133)), which consist of 58 Class A bits and 76 Class B bits as described in table 2 in
[4]. This results in a total of 138 bits, and 6 bits are needed for bit stuffing to arrive to the closest multiple
of 8, which is 144 bits.

Table 2. Example mapping of the AMR 6.7-kbps speech coding mode into AMR IF2
(The bits used for bit stuffing are denoted as UB (for "unused bit").)

MSB Mapping of bits LSB

AMR 6.7
Octet Bit 8 Bit 7 Bit 6 Bit 5 Bit 4 Bit 3 Bit 2 Bit 1

Frame Type (= 3)
1 MSB ........ LSB
d(3) d(2) d(1) d(0) 0 0 1 1
2 d(11) d(10) d(9) d(8) d(7) d(6) d(5) d(4)

3 … … … … … … … d(12)

Stuffing bits
18

UB UB UB UB UB UB d(133) d(132)

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Discontinuous Transmission (DTX)

In a typical telephone conversation, voice transmission alternates frequently between the speaking
parties, leaving long pauses of silence. These pauses can be efficiently represented as background noise
and transmitted at a much lower bit rate than speech. The discontinuous transmission mode is used to
encode frames that contain only background noise.

When AMR operates in DTX mode, a voice activity detector (VAD) on the transmission (TX) side
evaluates whether a frame contains any voice data. In the absence of speech, a silence information
descriptor (SID) frame, which contains characteristics describing the background noise, is transmitted. On
the reception (RX) side, a comfort noise generator (CNG) is used to synthesize background noise based
on the SID frame parameters. On the TX side, the encoder generates “no data” frames until it detects a
change in the input signal (as background noise or speech).

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About the Encoder/Decoder Sample Programs

The sample programs encoder.c and decoder.c demonstrate how to initialize and call the encoding and
decoding processes. Input to the encoder and output from the decoder is in the form of 16-bit PCM words
containing 14-bit left-aligned uniform speech samples.

Usage of the encoder

encoder (-dtx) mode speech_file bitstream_file

-dtx Enables discontinous transmission mode.

mode Specifies encoding at one of the 8 AMR-NB bit rates.
–modefile filename Can be used instead of the mode argument to specify the encoding mode for
each frame from a mode control file. This text file should contain one mode
number (0-7) per line.

This table shows the AMR encoding modes and their bit rates.

Mode 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Bit rate
4.75 5.15 5.90 6.70 7.40 7.95 10.20 12.20
(kbps)

Usage of the decoder

decoder bitstream_file synth_file

Building the sample programs

To build the speech encoder or decoder sample programs, compile the file encoder.c (or decoder.c). Link
this object file to the codec static AMR-NB library.

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AMR API functions

E_IF_init

Description Allocates and initializes the encoder state memory.

Syntax #include " interf_enc.h "

void * E_IF_init (dtx);

Arguments dtx dtx = 1 to enable discontinuous transmission

Returned value void * Pointer to the state memory used by the encoder

E_IF_encode

Description Encodes one frame of speech data into a byte-aligned IF2 compatible
packed data stream.

Syntax #include " interf_enc.h "

int E_IF_encode (Word16 mode, Word16 *speech,

Uword8 *serial);

Arguments mode Encoding mode at one of 8 AMR-NB bit rates (0-7)

speech Input buffer containing one frame of speech samples
serial Output buffer containing compressed data

Returned value Number of bytes written to output buffer

E_IF_exit

Description Frees the encoder state

Syntax #include " interf_enc.h "

void E_IF_exit ();

Arguments

Returned value None

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D_IF_init

Description Allocates and initializes the decoder state memory.

Syntax #include " interf_dec.h "

void * D_IF_init (void);

Arguments None

Returned value void * Pointer to state memory used by the decoder

D_IF_decode

Description Decodes one compressed speech frame.

Syntax #include " interf_dec.h "

void D_IF_Decode (Uword8 *bits, Word16 *synth);

Arguments bits Input buffer containing compressed data from the encoder

synth Output buffer containing one frame of decoded speech

samples

Returned value None

D_IF_exit

Description Frees the decoder state memory.

Syntax #include " interf_dec.h "

void D_IF_exit ();

Arguments

Returned value None

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