Sinusoidal-Based Lowband Synthesis for Artificial Speech Bandwidth Extension

Conventional narrowband (NB) telephony suffers from limited acoustic bandwidth at the receiver side, leading to degraded speech quality and intelligibility. In this paper, artificial speech bandwidth extension (ABE) of NB speech toward missing frequencies below about 300 Hz (low-frequency band, LB) is proposed to enhance the speech quality. The LB-ABE in this paper is employed together with a preexisting ABE toward high-frequency components to obtain spectrally balanced speech signals. In an instrumental quality assessment, the spectral distance in the LB was improved by more than S dB compared to NB speech. In a subjective listening test, the gap of speech quality between wideband and NB speech was significantly reduced when employing the proposed ABE toward low frequencies. The LB extension was found to further improve the preexisting ABE toward higher frequencies by a significant 0.26 CMOS points.