A Clipping-Based Selective-Tap Adaptive Filtering Approach to Stereophonic Acoustic Echo Cancellation

Stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation remains one of the challenging areas for tele/video-conferencing applications. However, the existence of high interchannel coherence between the two input signals for such systems leads to considerable degradation in misalignment convergence of the adaptive filters. We propose a new algorithm for improving the convergence performance and steady-state misalignment by considering robustness to the source position in the transmission room. We achieve this by exploiting the inherent decorrelating properties of selective-tap adaptive filtering as well as employing a variable clipping threshold for the unselected taps. Simulation results using colored noise and speech signals show an improvement over existing algorithms both in terms of convergence rate as well as steady-state normalized misalignment.