No abstract

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.

Methods based on sparse representation have found great use in the recovery of audio signals degraded by clipping. The state of the art in declipping within the sparsity-based approaches has been achieved by the SPADE algorithm by Kitić et. al. (LVA/ICA'15). Our recent study (LVA/ICA'18) has shown that although the original S-SPADE can be improved such that it converges faster than the A-SPADE, the restoration quality is significantly worse. In the present paper, we propose a new version of S-SPADE. Experiments show that the novel version of S-SPADE outperforms its old version in terms of restoration quality, and that it is comparable with the A-SPADE while being even slightly faster than A-SPADE.

The state of the art in audio declipping has currently been achieved by SPADE (SParse Audio DEclipper) algorithm by Kitić et al. Until now, the synthesis/sparse variant, S-SPADE, has been considered significantly slower than its analysis/cosparse counterpart, A-SPADE. It turns out that the opposite is true: by exploiting a recent projection lemma, individual iterations of both algorithms can be made equally computationally expensive, while S-SPADE tends to require considerably fewer iterations to converge. In this paper, the two algorithms are compared across a range of parameters such as the window length, window overlap and redundancy of the transform. The experiments show that although S-SPADE typically converges faster, the average performance in terms of restoration quality is not superior to A-SPADE.