Realtime voice communication over the Internet has rapidly gained popularity. It is indeed essential to reduce the total bandwidth consumption to efficiently use the available bandwidth for the subscribers having low speed connectivity and even otherwise. In this paper we introduce a novel technique to identify the voice and silent regions of a speech stream that is very much suitable for VoIP calls. We use an entropy measure, which is based on the spacings of order statistics of speech frames to differentiate the silence zones from the speech zones. We developed an algorithm that uses an adaptive thresholding to minimize the misdetection. The performance of our approach is compared with the built-in VAD of AMR codec. Our approach yields comparatively better saving in bandwidth yet maintaining a good quality of the speech streams. Further, the proposed approach has improved voice detection compared to the AMR schemes under noisy conditions. The ideas presented in this paper has been identified novel during the WIPO international patent search.@en

Recently, porting real-time collaborative services on the Internet has been attracting much interest. Mixing packets from all clients in a conference can lead to diminished speech clarity. In this paper, we desribe real-time voice conferencing service framework designed for a Virtual Conferencing Environment. We propose a system designed to accommodate a large number of participants without losing spontaneity. We surmise that change in speakers addressing the conference should not be abrupt, which transpires when the decision is exclusively based on floor techniques leading lower quality of conference. We propose a dynamic conference control and media handling of a conference taking into account users behavior. We try to allow users to decide who shoudl have the floor to address the conference instinctively. Highlights of this architecture are scalability, bandwidth saving and improvement in quality of the conference. The contributions of this work aid in faster and user-friendly implementations of collaborative conferencing systems on the Internet. A working prototype has been field tested on a campus wide subnet.@en