Nonlinearity-Robust Linear Acoustic Echo Canceller Using the Maximum Correntropy Criterion

Abstract

For the problem of acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) with nonlinear distortions, we propose to use a linear adaptive filter that maximizes the Correntropy similarity measure instead of the conventional minimization of the mean squared error (MSE) criterion. The maximum Correntropy criterion (MCC) offers robustness to outliers and impulsive noise, which is interesting for the case of speech signal coupled with nonlinearities. To assess the performance of the algorithm, we consider a hard-clipping memoryless saturation nonlinearity. Our simulation results show very interesting performance of the normalized MCC-based linear adaptive filter for the echo return loss enhancement (ERLE) and misalignment measures compared to the MSE-based normalized least mean squares (NLMS) approach. Furthermore, the NMCC adaptive filter has a similar computational complexity as the NLMS algorithm, which makes it very attractive in practical implementations