Evgenii Indenbom

Evgenii Indenbom, Nicolae-Catalin Ristea, Ando Saabas et al.

Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), noise suppression (NS) and dereverberation (DR) are an integral part of modern full-duplex communication systems. As the demand for teleconferencing systems increases, addressing these tasks is required for an effective and efficient online meeting experience. Most prior research proposes solutions for these tasks separately, combining them with digital signal processing (DSP) based components, resulting in complex pipelines that are often impractical to deploy in real-world applications. This paper proposes a real-time cross-attention deep model, named DeepVQE, based on residual convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to simultaneously address AEC, NS, and DR. We conduct several ablation studies to analyze the contributions of different components of our model to the overall performance. DeepVQE achieves state-of-the-art performance on non-personalized tracks from the ICASSP 2023 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge and ICASSP 2023 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge test sets, showing that a single model can handle multiple tasks with excellent performance. Moreover, the model runs in real-time and has been successfully tested for the Microsoft Teams platform.

Evgenii Indenbom, Nicolae-Cătălin Ristea, Ando Saabas et al.

With recent research advances, deep learning models have become an attractive choice for acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) in real-time teleconferencing applications. Since acoustic echo is one of the major sources of poor audio quality, a wide variety of deep models have been proposed. However, an important but often omitted requirement for good echo cancellation quality is the synchronization of the microphone and far end signals. Typically implemented using classical algorithms based on cross-correlation, the alignment module is a separate functional block with known design limitations. In our work we propose a deep learning architecture with built-in self-attention based alignment, which is able to handle unaligned inputs, improving echo cancellation performance while simplifying the communication pipeline. Moreover, we show that our approach achieves significant improvements for difficult delay estimation cases on real recordings from AEC Challenge data set.

Tanel Pärnamaa, Martin Lumiste, Ardi Loot et al.

Neural video codecs have surpassed classical codecs in coding efficiency but remain impractical for deployment due to cross-platform incompatibility and high computational cost. Existing quantization-based solutions fail to produce deterministic results across diverse hardware platforms, leading to catastrophic decoding failures. We introduce MLVC, a hardware-robust neural video codec designed for practical cross-platform inference. The key idea is to explicitly transmit scale parameters through the hyperprior, which guarantees entropy coding consistency across devices without requiring bit-exact arithmetic. While this increases bitrate overhead, we recover most of the coding efficiency through architectural improvements (gated memory, ReGLU activation), a long-term reference recovery mechanism, and domain-specific perceptual training. On the VCD video conferencing benchmark, MLVC achieves >70% BD-rate (MOS) improvement over hardware HEVC, the strongest deployable baseline, while reaching subjective quality competitive with DCVC-RT, which cannot operate across diverse platforms. Both the encoder and decoder run at 100 FPS on average on commodity NPUs from Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm. MLVC is the first neural video codec to combine competitive compression performance, real-time speed, and cross-platform robustness across diverse consumer devices, making it suitable for widespread deployment. Code will be released.