STFT-based multi-channel acoustic interference suppressor

In this paper we describe a system that suppresses the acoustic interference due to the coupling between the microphone and the loudspeakers of a hands-free multi-channel desktop audio system. The proposed system operates in the short-time Fourier transform domain and uses spectral subtraction to suppress the unwanted interference, which consists of the local audio and the remote speech signal (echo). The interference estimate is obtained with a sub-band RLS-based adaptive multi-channel echo canceller. Test results show that under some adverse conditions and with low complexity constraints the system can achieve better and more consistent speech quality than a time-domain acoustic echo canceller