Novel DTD and VAD assisted voice detection algorithm for VoIP systems

Abstract

Echo cancellation plays an important role in current Internet protocol (IP) based voice interactive systems. Voice state detection is an essential part in echo cancellation. It mainly comprises two parts: double talk detection (DTD) and voice activity detection (VAD). DTD is used to detect doubletalk and prevent filter divergence in the presence of near-end speech, and VAD is used to determine the near-end voice activity and output silence indicator when near-end is silent. However, DTD straightforwardly proceeded may mistakenly declare double talk under double silent condition, coefficients update under the far-end silence condition may lead to filter divergence, and current VAD algorithms may misjudge the residual echo from the near end to be far-end voice. Therefore, a voice detection algorithm combining DTD and far-end VAD is proposed. DTD is implemented when VAD declares far-end speech, filtering and coefficients update will be halted when VAD declares far-end silence, and the far-end VAD adopted is multi-feature VAD based on short-time energy and correlation. The new algorithm can improve the accuracy of DTD, prevent filter divergence, and exclude the circumstance that far-end signal only contains residual echo from near end. Actual test results show that the voice state decision of the new algorithm is accurate, and the performance of echo cancellation is improved.