Perceptually-Motivated Nonlinear Channel Decorrelation For Stereo Acoustic Echo Cancellation
This addresses the challenge of stereo acoustic echo cancellation for audio systems, but appears incremental as it builds on existing methods for coherence reduction.
The paper tackles the under-determined problem of stereo acoustic echo cancellation by reducing inter-channel coherence without degrading audio quality, using a novel non-linear method that combines a shaped comb-allpass filter with psychoacoustically masked noise, and shows it performs significantly better than other known methods.
Acoustic echo cancellation with stereo signals is generally an under-determined problem because of the high coherence between the left and right channels. In this paper, we present a novel method of significantly reducing inter-channel coherence without affecting the audio quality. Our work takes into account psychoacoustic masking and binaural auditory cues. The proposed non-linear processing combines a shaped comb-allpass (SCAL) filter with the injection of psychoacoustically masked noise. We show that the proposed method performs significantly better than other known methods for reducing inter-channel coherence.