Ondřej Mokrý

Pavel Záviška, Pavel Rajmic, Ondřej Mokrý

Some audio declipping methods produce waveforms that do not fully respect the physical process of clipping, which is why we refer to them as inconsistent. This letter reports what effect on perception it has if the solution by inconsistent methods is forced consistent by postprocessing. We first propose a simple sample replacement method, then we identify its main weaknesses and propose an improved variant. The experiments show that the vast majority of inconsistent declipping methods significantly benefit from the proposed approach in terms of objective perceptual metrics. In particular, we show that the SS PEW method based on social sparsity combined with the proposed method performs comparable to top methods from the consistent class, but at a computational cost of one order of magnitude lower.

Pavel Záviška, Pavel Rajmic, Ondřej Mokrý

The paper deals with the hitherto neglected topic of audio dequantization. It reviews the state-of-the-art sparsity-based approaches and proposes several new methods. Convex as well as non-convex approaches are included, and all the presented formulations come in both the synthesis and analysis variants. In the experiments the methods are evaluated using the signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) and PEMO-Q, a perceptually motivated metric.

Ondřej Mokrý, Pavel Rajmic, Pavel Záviška

The paper presents a unified, flexible framework for the tasks of audio inpainting, declipping, and dequantization. The concept is further extended to cover analogous degradation models in a transformed domain, e.g. quantization of the signal's time-frequency coefficients. The task of reconstructing an audio signal from degraded observations in two different domains is formulated as an inverse problem, and several algorithmic solutions are developed. The viability of the presented concept is demonstrated on an example where audio reconstruction from partial and quantized observations of both the time-domain signal and its time-frequency coefficients is carried out.

Ondřej Mokrý, Pavel Rajmic

We deal with the problem of sparsity-based audio inpainting, i.e. filling in the missing segments of audio. A consequence of the approaches based on mathematical optimization is the insufficient amplitude of the signal in the filled gaps. Remaining in the framework based on sparsity and convex optimization, we propose improvements to audio inpainting, aiming at compensating for such an energy loss. The new ideas are based on different types of weighting, both in the coefficient and the time domains. We show that our propositions improve the inpainting performance in terms of both the SNR and ODG.

Ondřej Mokrý, Pavel Záviška, Pavel Rajmic et al.

A novel sparsity-based algorithm for audio inpainting is proposed. It is an adaptation of the SPADE algorithm by Kitić et al., originally developed for audio declipping, to the task of audio inpainting. The new SPAIN (SParse Audio INpainter) comes in synthesis and analysis variants. Experiments show that both A-SPAIN and S-SPAIN outperform other sparsity-based inpainting algorithms. Moreover, A-SPAIN performs on a par with the state-of-the-art method based on linear prediction in terms of the SNR, and, for larger gaps, SPAIN is even slightly better in terms of the PEMO-Q psychoacoustic criterion.