PHAIN: Audio Inpainting via Phase-Aware Optimization With Instantaneous Frequency

Audio inpainting restores locally corrupted parts of digital audio signals. Sparsity-based methods achieve this by promoting sparsity in the time-frequency (T-F) domain, assuming short-time audio segments consist of a few sinusoids. However, such sparsity promotion reduces the magnitudes of the resulting waveforms; moreover, it often ignores the temporal connections of sinusoidal components. To address these problems, we propose a novel phase-aware audio inpainting method. Our method minimizes the time variations of a particular T-F representation calculated using the time derivative of the phase. This promotes sinusoidal components that coherently fit in the corrupted parts without directly suppressing the magnitudes. Both objective and subjective experiments confirmed the superiority of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods.