Avoiding over-estimation in bandwidth extension of telephony speech

We present a new way of treating the problem of extending a narrow-band signal to a wide-band signal. For many cases of bandwidth extension, the high-band energy is overestimated, leading to undesirable audible artifacts. To overcome these problems we introduce an asymmetric cost-function in the estimation process of the high-band that penalizes over-estimates more than under-estimates of the energy in the high-band. We show that the resulting attenuation of the estimated high-band energy depends on the broadness of the a-posteriori distribution of the energy given the extracted information about the narrow-band. Thus, the uncertainty about how to extend the signal at the high-band influences the level of extension. Results from a listening test show that the proposed algorithm produces less artifacts.

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