ARCON Digital Speech Processing - Government Customers and Affiliations

Government

ARCON's Digital Speech Processing group has maintained a relationship with the NSA research group responsible for speech coding (R22) since the mid 1980s. NSA has provided the chairmanship to the DoD Digital Voice Processing Consortium (DDVPC) and its predecessor organizations since the selection of Linear Predictive Coding as a DoD standard in the 1970s. ARCON participated in the DDVPC as an Air Force technical consultant for many years. In 1996 ARCON was contracted by NSA to provide technical consultation and management of the DDVPC. In 2000 these responsibilities were extended to include technical consultation to NSA as the US national representative to the NATO SC/6 AdHoc Working Group 3 on Narrowband Voice Coding. This effort continues to the present day.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DARPA is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD). It manages and directs selected basic and applied research and development projects for DoD, and pursues research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions. The Advanced Technology Office (ATO) researches, demonstrates, and develops high payoff projects in maritime, communications, special operations, and information assurance and survivability mission areas. These projects support military operations throughout the spectrum of conflict. ATO adapts advanced technologies into military systems and also exploits emerging technologies for future programs. The ultimate goal is superior cost-effective systems the military can use to respond to new and emerging threats.

ARCON's Digital Speech Processing group has provided technical consultation and T&E services to the DARPA/ATO Advanced Speech Coder program (ASE) from its Phase 1 effort through to the present day. ARCON has worked directly with the program management team providing expertise on subjective test metrics and methodologies. ARCON performed the testing for the ASE Phase 1 milestone decisions and provided analysis of the test results. ARCON has been chosen to provide corpus collection, test plan design, subjective testing and analysis for the ASE Phase 2 effort which is focused on an ultra low rate coder operating at 300bps.

ARCON's Digital Speech Processing group provides technical consultation to the NATO Command Consultation and Control Board Communications Networks Subcommittee 6's Ad Hoc Working Group 3 (NC3B SC/6-AHWG/3). This AHWG was recently renamed Multimedia Conferencing from its previous name Narrow Band Voice Coder. This support is provided through an ARCON contract with NSA, the US DoD representative organization and chair of AHWG/3. Since 1999, ARCON has been heavily involved with this group in the selection and standardization of STANAG 4591 THE 1200 AND 2400 BIT/S NATO INTEROPERABLE NARROW BAND VOICE CODER.

The selection process for STANAG 4591 took place in two phases, which are now completed. These are followed by a validation phase involving communicability tests using real-time implementations of the selected voice coder. ARCON has been supporting this effort throughout all phases, providing the English language portion of the input speech database, performing and analyzing the Intelligibility, Quality and Speaker Recognizability tests in English, and the design of the selection criteria. Support will continue in the validation phase by conducting the communicability test and test bed developed at ARCON.

The SC/6-AHWG/3 is currently changing its direction from speech coding to multimedia conferencing and end-to-end network security. ARCON will continue to provide support to AHWG/3 through NSA.

NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A)
STANAG 4591: Post 2000 NATO Narrow Band Voice Coder

The NATO C3 Agency (NC3A) is tasked by the NATO C3 Board (NC3B) to develop, procure and implement state of the art C3 capabilities for NATO and to provide unbiased scientific advice and support to NATO authorities. As such, the NC3A has acted as the contracting agency for the SC/6-AHWG/3 group for all efforts associated with the selection of STANAG4591. During the selection process, ARCON was contracted by the NC3A to provide Intelligibility, Quality and Speaker Recognizability testing services. ARCON is currently contracted by the NC3A to provide communicability testing of the selected STANAG4591 coder.

The NC3A is the repository for all data and computer code associated with STANAG4591.

US Air Force Research Laboratory
ARCON's Digital Speech Processing group maintained a relationship with the AFRL Communications Security Office at Hanscom AFB and its predecessor organizations AFCRL and Rome Laboratories from 1975 through 2000. At that time AFRL discontinued research efforts in low-rate speech coding. ARCON's efforts included real-time implementation of speech coders, development of T&E hardware and software systems, speech coder research, development of new subjective evaluation methodologies and research into the relationship between military acoustic noise environments and speech coders. In addition, ARCON participated in the selection and standardization of digital speech coders for the US Department of Defense.

US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)
ARCON's Digital Speech Processing group has worked for many years with groups within the Naval Research Laboratory responsible for Digital Voice Coding. NRL has represented the US Navy in the DoD Digital Voice Processing Consortium (DDVPC) and its predecessors since the early 1970's. Through ARCON's work consulting for the USAF and later NSA within the DDVPC, ARCON has worked closely with NRL scientists on the T&E and selection of several DoD voice coder standards. In addition, ARCON has provided consultation in the area of Human Factors directly to NRL through the GSA schedule. ARCON has also collected acoustic noise and speech corpora for NRL. The acoustic noise platforms included a US Marine Urban Warfare scenario and locations aboard the USS Washington Aircraft Carrier. Conversational speech in noise corpora were provided to NRL for the DARPA SPINE 1 and SPINE 2 programs.