Declipping of Audio Signals Using Perceptual Compressed Sensing

The restoration of clipped audio signals, commonly known as declipping, is important to achieve an improved level of audio quality in many audio applications. In this paper, a novel declipping algorithm is presented, jointly based on the theory of compressed sensing (CS) and on well-established properties of human auditory perception. Declipping is formulated as a sparse signal recovery problem using the CS framework. By additionally exploiting knowledge of human auditory perception, a novel perceptual compressed sensing (PCS) framework is devised. A PCS-based declipping algorithm is proposed which uses ℓ₁-norm type reconstruction. Comparative objective and subjective evaluation experiments reveal a significant audio quality increase for the proposed PCS-based declipping algorithm compared to CS-based declipping algorithms.