Strategies for combining acoustic echo cancellation and adaptive beamforming microphone arrays

Abstract

New concepts for efficient combination of acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) and adaptive beamforming microphone arrays (ABMA) are presented. By decomposing common beamforming methods into a time-invariant part, which the AEC can integrate, and a separate time-variant part, the number of echo cancellers is minimized without rendering the system identification problem more difficult. Methods for controlling the interaction of ABMA and AEC are outlined and implementations for typical microphone array applications are discussed.