Spatio-temporal signal preprocessing for multichannel acoustic echo cancellation

Hands-free full-duplex communication systems require acoustic echo cancelers to reduce echoes. Multichannel sound reproduction enhances realism in virtual reality and multimedia communication systems. However, in the case of multichannel systems the acoustic echo cancellation problem is challenging because of the non-uniqueness of the solution in the least squares sense. There fore, preprocessing techniques are required. Known preprocessing approaches act in the temporal domain. In this paper we propose an acoustic echo cancellation preprocessing stage which bases on the spatial diversity offered by massive multichannel reproduction systems.