Frequency-Domain Stochastic Error Concealment for Wireless Audio Applications

Real time digital audio delivery over Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) represents an attractive, flexible and cost effective framework for realizing high-quality, multichannel home audio applications. However, the unreliable nature of WLANs IP link frequently imposes significant playback quality degradation, due to delay or permanent loss of a number of transmitted digital audio packets. In this paper, a novel packet error concealment technique is presented, based on the spectral reconstruction of the statistical equivalent of a previously successfully received audio data packet. It is shown that the proposed data reconstruction scheme outperforms previously published error concealment strategies, in both terms of objective and perceptual criteria.