A virtual stereo approach to stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation

This paper proposes a virtual stereo system that behaves like a stereo system but requires standard mono-aural communication channel. Since many human conversations are single talker, at the far-end side the system obtains a single channel signal by performing a Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation and a passive beamforming on the true stereo signal, while at the near-end side it uses an active beamformer to reproduce the stereo effect. A single acoustic echo canceler can now be used, with some advantages over the true stereophonic system. The information on the direction of arrival can be included into the coded digital stream or can be perceptually hidden into the speech signal over standard analog channels