improving partition-block-based acoustic echo canceler in under-modeling scenarios

Recently, a partitioned-block-based frequency-domain Kalman filter (PFKF) has been proposed for acoustic echo cancellation. Compared with the normal frequency-domain Kalman filter, the PFKF utilizes the partitioned-block structure, resulting in both fast convergence and low time-latency. We present an analysis of the steady-state behavior of the PFKF and found that it suffers from a biased steady-state solution when the filter is of deficient length. Accordingly, we propose an effective modification that has the benefit of the guaranteed optimal steady-state behavior. Simulations are conducted to validate the improved performance of the proposed method.Comment: accepted by interspeech202

Efficient improvement of frequency-domain Kalman filter

The frequency-domain Kalman filter (FKF) has been utilized in many audio signal processing applications due to its fast convergence speed and robustness. However, the performance of the FKF in under-modeling situations has not been investigated. This paper presents an analysis of the steady-state behavior of the commonly used diagonalized FKF and reveals that it suffers from a biased solution in under-modeling scenarios. Two efficient improvements of the FKF are proposed, both having the benefits of the guaranteed optimal steady-state behavior at the cost of a very limited increase of the computational burden. The convergence behavior of the proposed algorithms is also compared analytically. Computer simulations are conducted to validate the improved performance of the proposed methods.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Nonlinear Residual Echo Suppression Based on Multi-stream Conv-TasNet

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 keeping a lower latency of the whole system. Simulation results validate the efficacy of the proposed method in both single-talk and double-talk situations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

A Synergistic Kalman- and Deep Postfiltering Approach to Acoustic Echo Cancellation

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 filter. The proposed synergistic scheme allows for rapid reconvergence of the adaptive filter after abrupt echo path changes without compromising the steady state performance achieved by state-of-the-art approaches in static scenarios