A new adaptive beamformer for optimal acoustic echo and noise cancellation with less computational load

Abstract

In this paper, we investigates positive synergies of the combination of acoustic echo canceller with new adaptive beamformer (NABF) for acoustic echo and background noise cancellation. The NABF uses multichannel linear prediction error filters (LPEFs) in the sidelobe canceling path and adaptive noise estimation filters (ANEFs) in the multi-channel noise canceller. Since the AEC module is located behind the fixed beamformer of the NABF only one AEC module is required and the AEC does not feel any repercussions from the NABF. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed integrated scheme (AECNABF), it is compared to the multi-channel acoustic echo canceller (AEC-first) which provide good performance but at the expense of very high computational complexity. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is comparable to that of AEC-first scheme with very less computational complexity.