Combined residual echo and noise reduction: A novel psychoacoustically motivated algorithm

In this paper we focus on the problem of acoustic echo cancellation and noise reduction for hands-free telephony devices. A standard echo canceller is combined with a frequency domain post-filter, which applies a novel psychoacoustically motivated weighting rule. The algorithm makes use of the masking threshold of the human auditory system to achieve a perceived reduction of noise and residual echo equal to some pre-defined levels. In contrast to conventional methods, the proposed one preserves the nature of the original background noise and doesn´t introduce any audible artifacts. At the same time it can attain a very high reduction of the residual echo.