Joint adaptive beamforming and echo cancellation using a non reference anchor array framework

In this paper, a method to combine adaptive beamforming microphone arrays with acoustic echo cancellation is proposed. A non reference array framework is used herein where an auxiliary microphone array is used to capture the interfering speech sources, in addition to the primary microphone array that captures the source of interest. An adaptive linearly constrained minimum variance (ALCMV) beamformer developed in the context of multi speech source environment is combined with an acoustic echo canceller by appropriately anchoring the auxiliary microphone array. Experimental results on clean speech acquisition on cell phone like devices indicate reasonable improvement over various beamforming methods.