Synthetic stereo acoustic echo cancellation structure with microphone array beamforming for VoIP conferences

Abstract

This paper proposes a synthetic stereo acoustic echo cancellation structure with microphone array beamforming for multiple participant voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) conferencing. The proposed acoustic front-end combines a synthetic stereo structure, acoustic echo canceler and microphone array beamformer. Synthetic stereo is used to add spatial information to signals from multiple participants that facilitates distinguishing between participants. Microphone array beamforming is then combined with the single canceler per spatial region echo cancellation structure to reduce noise and reverberation for near-end speech pickup and to cancel echo.