Audio packet loss concealment using motion-compensated spectral extrapolation

Abstract

This paper presents a packet loss concealment (PLC) method with applications to VoIP, wideband audio broadcast and streaming. The problem of modeling of time-varying frequency spectrum in the context of PLC is addressed and a novel solution is proposed for tracking and using the temporal motion of spectral flow. The proposed PLC utilizes a time-frequency motion (TFM) matrix representation of the audio signal where each frequency is tagged with a motion vector estimate. The spectral motion vectors are estimated by cross-correlating the movement of spectral energy within sub-bands across time frames. The missing packets are estimated in TFM domain and inverse transformed to the time-domain. In order to compare the proposed method with common approaches, objective performance evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), and subjective listening test in terms of MOS scores are conducted in a range of packet loss from 5% to 20%. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves performance compared to a number of benchmark methods including that of the ITU.