SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR COMMUNICATING A PERCEPTUALLY ENCODED SPEECH SPECTRUM SIGNAL

System efficiently communicates a perceptually encoded speech spectrum signal from a transmitter to a receiver. The transmitter includes a speech analyzer which accepts a speech signal input and generates a parameterized speech signal. The transmitter also includes a vector quantizer for generating the perceptually encoded speech spectrum signal from the parameterized speech signal. The receiver decodes the perceptually encoded speech spectrum signal to produce decoded spectral parameters to further produce a synthetic speech output. The vector quantizer performs a method for partitioning a vector quantizer (VQ) codebook to produce perceptually organized sub-codebooks. The vector quantizer performs a second method for quantizing a vector based on the perceptually organized sub-codebooks. The second method identifies a vector, from one of the perceptually organized sub-codebooks, to perceptually model the speech signal input.