An efficient method for combining adaptive echo and noise canceller in hands‐free systems
Jafar Ramadhan Mohammed · International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing · 2008
Abstract Acoustic interferences severely degrade the quality and the intelligibility of the desired speech signal, thus posing a severe problem for many speech applications. Several acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) techniques have been proposed with a view to solving this problem. There are, however, few reports of AEC methods working under real noisy conditions. In this paper, we investigate the maximum positive synergies of the combination of acoustic echo canceller with a new adaptive beamformer. The proposed system achieves both the AEC and noise reduction of speech in an actual environment with real noise sources. Since the AEC is located behind the fixed beamformer of the new adaptive beamformer only one AEC is required for an arbitrary number of array elements, and the AEC does not feel any repercussions from the new adaptive beamformer. The proposed system was implemented in a real environment using National Instruments NI‐PXI‐1042Q controller system and data acquisition card PXI‐4472. Experimental results show that the proposed system has successfully improved the performance of hands‐free systems. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.