Highly degraded audio restoration presents a live research field currently. However, the recovery of missing, saturated or quantized audio signal information has been studied only marginally in connection to psychoacoustics. The project will provide new models and techniques for audio signal restoration and compression, resulting in significantly improved perceptual quality of the restored audio, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. The new techniques will be based on convex and non-convex optimization and they will be encompassed by a unifying theoretical framework. The quality of restoration will be evaluated using both the perceptually-motivated objective measures and formal listening tests. The experimental part will answer the question whether simultaneous storage of subsampled and quantized data in both the time and transformed domains can lead to a new strategy of audio coding. Therefore, besides fundamental research, project results should indicate whether the new techniques could be potentially useful in practice in the future.
