Fast Signal Reconstruction from Magnitude Stft Spectrogram Based on Spectrogram Consistency

The modification of magnitude spectrograms is at the core of many audio signal processing methods, from source separation to sound modification or noise canceling, and reconstructing a natural sounding signal in such situations is thus a very important issue. This article presents recent theoretical and experimental developments on the application to signal reconstruction from a modified magnitude spectrogram of the constraints that an array of complex numbers must verify to be a consistent short-time Fourier transform (STFT) spectrogram, i.e., to be the STFT spectrogram of an actual real-valued signal. We give here further theoretical insights, present several potential variations on our previously introduced algorithm, investigate various techniques to speed up the signal reconstruction process, and present a thorough experimental comparison of the performance of all the considered algorithms.