Patent US 4,587,669

A device for providing real time speech compression and expansion and method therefor which enables speech data, sampled at a predetermined rate, and consisting of a preselected number of bits per sample, to be compressed in real time by a factor of approximately 2:1, and upon decomposition, to be essentially indistinguishable from the original digitized speech. In particular, the apparatus employs a method which involves the digitizing of the input data, determining the maximum amplitude of the data over a short given period, compressing the data by dividing the largest amplitude constant from the data over the given period to obtain a data sample, and storing the reduced data sample and corresponding amplitude constant or gain factor in a suitable storage medium. In the preferred embodiment, the storage medium is a rotating memory or a recirculating shift register. Amplitude or gain factor data is stored in a memory that need be only one sixty-fourth the size of the main memory, since, in the embodiment illustrated, a single gain factor data representation is used with sixty-four sets of sample data. On recall, sets of the sample data are multiplied by their corresponding gain factor to reproduce the data for use.