One of the main difficulties in echo cancellation is the fact that the learning rate needs to vary according to conditions such as double-talk and echo path change. In this paper we propose a new method of varying the learning rate of a frequency-domain echo canceller. This method is based on the derivation of the optimal learning rate of the NLMS algorithm in the presence of noise. The method is evaluated in conjunction with the multidelay block frequency domain (MDF) adaptive filter. We demonstrate that it performs better than current double-talk detection techniques and is simple to implement.
Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Human subjective evaluation is optimal to assess speech quality for human perception. The recently introduced deep noise suppression mean opinion score (DNSMOS) metric was shown to estimate human ratings with great accuracy. The signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) metric is widely used to evaluate residual-echo suppression (RES) systems by estimating speech quality during double-talk. However, since the SDR is affected by both speech distortion and residual-echo presence, it does not correlate well with human ratings according to the DNSMOS. To address that, we introduce two objective metrics to …
Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) whose aim is to suppress the echo originated from acoustic coupling between loudspeakers and microphones, plays a key role in voice interaction. Linear adaptive filter (AF) is always used for handling this problem. However, since there would be some severe effects in real scenarios, such nonlinear distortions, background noises, and microphone clipping, it would lead to considerable residual echo, giving poor performance in practice. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end network structure for echo cancellation, which is directly done on time-domain audio wave…
The ICASSP 2022 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge is intended to stimulate research in acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), which is an important area of speech enhancement and still a top issue in audio communication. This is the third AEC challenge and it is enhanced by including mobile scenarios, adding speech recognition rate in the challenge goal metrics, and making the default sample rate 48 kHz. In this challenge, we open source two large datasets to train AEC models under both single talk and double talk scenarios. These datasets consist of recordings from more than 10,000 real audio d…
Acoustic echo cannot be entirely removed by linear adaptive filters due to the nonlinear relationship between the echo and far-end signal. Usually a post processing module is required to further suppress the echo. In this paper, we propose a residual echo suppression method based on the modification of fully convolutional time-domain audio separation network (Conv-TasNet). Both the residual signal of the linear acoustic echo cancellation system, and the output of the adaptive filter are adopted to form multiple streams for the Conv-TasNet, resulting in more effective echo suppression while kee…
The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Microsoft Corp.（微软公司）
The ICASSP 2021 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge is intended to stimulate research in the area of acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), which is an important part of speech enhancement and still a top issue in audio communication and conferencing systems. Many recent AEC studies report good performance on synthetic datasets where the train and test samples come from the same underlying distribution. However, the AEC performance often degrades significantly on real recordings. Also, most of the conventional objective metrics such as echo return loss enhancement (ERLE) and perceptual evaluation …
Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) in full-duplex communication systems eliminates acoustic feedback. However, nonlinear distortions induced by audio devices, background noise, reverberation, and double-talk reduce the efficiency of conventional AEC systems. Several hybrid AEC models were proposed to address this, which use deep learning models to suppress residual echo from standard adaptive filtering. This paper proposes deep learning-based joint AEC and beamforming model (JAECBF) building on our previous self-attentive recurrent neural network (RNN) beamformer. The proposed network consists o…
Distortion resulting from acoustic echo suppression (AES) is a common issue in full-duplex communication. To address the distortion problem, a multi-frame minimum variance distortionless response (MFMVDR) filtering technique is proposed. The MFMVDR filter with parameter estimation which was used in speech enhancement problems is extended in this study from a deep learning perspective. To alleviate numerical instability of the MFMVDR filter, we propose to directly estimate the inverse of the correlation matrix. The AES system is advantageous in that no double-talk detection is required. The neg…
Neural networks have led to tremendous performance gains for single-task speech enhancement, such as noise suppression and acoustic echo cancellation (AEC). In this work, we evaluate whether it is more useful to use a single joint or separate modules to tackle these problems. We describe different possible implementations and give insights into their performance and efficiency. We show that using a separate echo cancellation module and a module for noise and residual echo removal results in less near-end speech distortion and better performance during double-talk at same complexity.
Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) plays a key role in speech interaction by suppressing the echo received at microphone introduced by acoustic reverberations from loudspeakers. Since the performance of linear adaptive filter (AF) would degrade severely due to nonlinear distortions, background noises, and microphone clipping in real scenarios, deep learning has been employed for AEC for its good nonlinear modelling ability. In this paper, we constructed an end-to-end multi-scale attention neural network for AEC. Temporal convolution is first used to transform waveform into spectrogram. The spect…
We introduce a novel method for controlling the functionality of a hands-free speech communication device which comprises a model-based acoustic echo canceller (AEC), minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer (BF) and spectral postfilter (PF). While the AEC removes the early echo component, the MVDR BF and PF suppress the residual echo and background noise. As key innovation, we suggest to use a single deep neural network (DNN) to jointly control the adaptation of the various algorithmic components. This allows for rapid convergence and high steady-state performance in the pre…
We introduce a synergistic approach to double-talk robust acoustic echo cancellation combining adaptive Kalman filtering with a deep neural network-based postfilter. The proposed algorithm overcomes the well-known limitations of Kalman filter-based adaptation control in scenarios characterized by abrupt echo path changes. As the key innovation, we suggest to exploit the different statistical properties of the interfering signal components for robustly estimating the adaptation step size. This is achieved by leveraging the postfilter near-end estimate and the estimation error of the Kalman filt…
The Kalman filter has been adopted in acoustic echo cancellation due to its robustness to double-talk, fast convergence, and good steady-state performance. The performance of Kalman filter is closely related to the estimation accuracy of the state noise covariance and the observation noise covariance. The estimation error may lead to unacceptable results, especially when the echo path suffers abrupt changes, the tracking performance of the Kalman filter could be degraded significantly. In this paper, we propose the neural Kalman filtering (NKF), which uses neural networks to implicitly model t…
Institute for Communications Technology, Technische Universität Braunschweig（布伦瑞克工业大学通信技术研究所）
In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) were studied as an alternative to traditional acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) algorithms. The proposed models achieved remarkable performance for the separate tasks of AEC and residual echo suppression (RES). A promising network topology is a fully convolutional recurrent network (FCRN) structure, which has already proven its performance on both noise suppression and AEC tasks, individually. However, the combination of AEC, postfiltering, and noise suppression to a single network typically leads to a noticeable decline in the quality of the near-en…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Adaptive filtering algorithms are commonplace in signal processing and have wide-ranging applications from single-channel denoising to multi-channel acoustic echo cancellation and adaptive beamforming. Such algorithms typically operate via specialized online, iterative optimization methods and have achieved tremendous success, but require expert knowledge, are slow to develop, and are difficult to customize. In our work, we present a new method to automatically learn adaptive filtering update rules directly from data. To do so, we frame adaptive filtering as a differentiable operator and train…
A computationally efficient semi-blind source separation based approach for nonlinear echo cancellation based on an element-wise iterative source steering
