Automated recovery of damaged audio files using deep neural networks

In this paper, we propose two methods to recover damaged audio files using deep neural networks. The presented audio file recovery methods differ from the conventional file carving-based recovery method because the former restore lost data, which are difficult to recover with the latter method. This research suggests that recovery tasks, which are essential yet very difficult or very time consuming, can be automated with the proposed recovery methods using deep neural networks. We apply feed-forward and Long Short Term Memory neural networks for the tasks. The experimental results show that deep neural networks can distinguish speech signals from non-speech signals, and can also identify the encoding methods of the audio files at the level of bits. This leads to successful recovery of the damaged audio files, which are otherwise difficult to recover using the conventional file-carving-based methods. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.