EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

A Robust Noise and Echo Canceller

Khaldoon Al-Naimi, Christian Sturt, Ahmet Kondoz

University of Surrey, U.K.

The performance of an echo canceller systems deployed in a practical communication environment (i.e. the presence of background noise and the possible double talk scenario) depends on an accurate Voice Activity Detector (VAD) and an effective filter coefficient adaptation strategies. Accuracy of the VAD, which affects the coefficient adaptation strategy, is itself affected by the presence of background noise. In this paper, a novel soft weighting approach is proposed to replace the VAD and filter coefficient adaptation strategy. The robustness of the echo canceller system is further improved through integrating it with a noise suppression algorithm. The integrated echo canceller and noise suppressor systems has shown excellent performances under double talk scenarios with SNR as low as 5 dB.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Al-Naimi, Khaldoon / Sturt, Christian / Kondoz, Ahmet (2003): "A robust noise and echo canceller", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 1437-1440.