Inpainting audio data?

Not only images have holes to be filled: missing data problems also occur in audio.

Audio inpainting is a general framework encountered in many audio applications:

• Audio click removal: to reconstruct audio samples masked by impulsions in scratched CDs or old recordings.
• Audio declipping: to restore saturated samples from low-amplitude ones.
• Audio packet loss concealment: to fill large portions of missing audio, due to packets lost in communication networks.
• Audio bandwidth extension: to retrieve the energy in high-frequency bands from low-frequency contents.
• Local time-frequency restoration: e.g., to reduce artefacts from state of the art time-frequency audio source separation methods

An example: audio declipping

In the declipping problem, one must inpaint the portions of signals where the amplitudes are beyond the saturation threshold, based on the observation of the low-amplitude samples.

The figure below shows the restoration (dark gray) of a clipped speech signal (black), using our audio inpainting algorithm. The light gray curve is the reference signal before clipping.

Source: Adler et al., 2011.

Try it now !

Interested in Audio Inpainting ? Try it yourself with the Matlab toolbox available here : Audio Inpainting toolbox.

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