A microphone array system with echo canceller

This paper proposes a microphone array unified with an echo canceller that resolves the problem of deteriorated echo suppression performance due to variations of the echo path when a microphone array and an echo canceller are connected. In a teleconferencing system, high-quality sound acquisition with noise suppression is desirable in addition to acoustic echo suppression. However, in a configuration in which a microphone array to suppress the noise and an echo canceller to suppress the echo are simply connected, the adaptation for the echo canceller cannot follow the echo path variations due to directivity control of the microphone array, so that there is a problem of deteriorated echo suppression performance. In the microphone array with an echo canceller proposed in this paper, the training of the microphone array and that of the echo canceller are performed in a unified way. In this way, the problem of deteriorated echo suppression performance due to echo path variations can be resolved. An evaluation experiment shows that the proposed method can perform stable noise suppression and echo cancellation. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 89(10): 23–32, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20090