MELP and MELPe Vocoders: The Evolution of Military Speech Communication

This article introduces Mixed-Excitation Linear Prediction (MELP) and its enhanced version, MELPe, vocoders. Originally invented by Alan McCree, MELP became a US DoD standard (MIL-STD-3005) in 1997 and saw widespread use in military applications and satellite communications. MELPe, an improvement on MELP, became the new MIL-STD-3005 in 2001 and was adopted by NATO as STANAG-4591 in 2002. MELPe significantly outperforms older military standards like CELP and LPC-10e in speech quality, intelligibility, and noise immunity, especially in noisy environments.