A system approach to acoustic echo cancellation in robust hands-free teleconferencing

This paper presents a system approach to the acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) problem in a noisy acoustic environment. We propose a method that makes use of the estimated near-end signal from a postfilter to further improve the AEC system performance. The cancellation performance is enhanced especially during strong near-end interference (e.g., double talk). Simulation results show that our stereophonic AEC based on the system approach with postfilter integration outperforms the one using the original robust AEC system by itself without postfilter integration. The improved performance is noted especially during double talk, where simulation results show that the true echo return loss enhancement can be boosted by as much as 10 dB.