US Patent 7373298 Apparatus and method for coding excitation signal

An excitation signal coding apparatus capable of improving an error resilience by changing an excitation vector search method (more specifically, an error minimization criterion during a search). This coding apparatus is allowed to choose either of an ordinary search method and the search method of the present invention with using information input from a transmission channel condition monitoring section (215). That is, an ordinary search method is used when the transmission channel condition is good and no packet discarding is observed on the receiving side, and the search method of the present invention is used otherwise (when packet discarding is observed on the receiving side at a discarding rate of 5% or more, for example).