To reduce the burden of storing and transmitting audio signals, they are often compressed with a lossy single-channel code. Because the high-frequency components are effectively truncated when using a low bitrate encoder, listeners may experience the sound as being uncomfortable, muffled, or dull. To compensate for the perceived degradation, bandwidth extension technology can be used to regenerate the missing high frequencies from the low-frequency components during the decoding process. In this paper the authors propose a bandwidth extension method based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), which is used to estimate the relationship between the MDCT spectrum in the high-frequency part and the low-frequency part. It is evaluated by a discriminant network in the GAN to get a more natural result. A complete audio coding system was built by using AAC Low Complex as the single-channel core encoder with the proposed bandwidth extension method. To evaluate the audio quality decoded by the new system, a subjective evaluation experiment was carried out using the HE-AAC as the baseline system with the MUSHRA experimental method.
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https://aes2.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=20708
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