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.

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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.

In convex optimization, it is often inevitable to work with projectors onto convex sets composed with a linear operator. Such a need arises from both the theory and applications, with signal processing being a prominent and broad field where convex optimization has been used recently. In this article, a novel projector is presented, which generalizes previous results in that it admits to work with a broader family of linear transforms when compared with the state of the art but, on the other hand, it is limited to box-type convex sets in the transformed domain. The new projector is described by an explicit formula, which makes it simple to implement and requires a low computational cost. The projector is interpreted within the framework of the so-called proximal splitting theory. The convenience of the new projector is demonstrated on an example from signal processing, where it was possible to speed up the convergence of a signal declipping algorithm by a factor of more than two.

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