schwartz24@interspeech_2024@ISCA

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#1 Efficient Joint Bemforming and Acoustic Echo Cancellation Structure for Conference Call Scenarios [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Ofer Schwartz ; Sharon Gannot

We propose an efficient scheme for combining beamformer (BF) and acoustic echo cancellation (AEC). We focus on conference call scenarios characterized by stationary background noise and multiple speakers who alternate frequently. Furthermore, aiming at low-resource devices, a common strategy is to apply a single AEC at the output of the BF rather than applying multiple AECs to each microphone signal. The main drawback of such a structure is the frequent change of the echo path due to the BF adaptation. To circumvent this problem, it is proposed to apply a single-channel pre-filter to the far-end signal, encompassing the BF weights and the relative acoustic responses between the reference microphone and all other microphones w.r.t. the echo loudspeaker. As a result, the AEC block becomes indifferent to the changes in the BF weights. The proposed scheme is evaluated using real recordings and was found advantageous over standard combined AEC-BF schemes in terms of speed of convergence.