A Nonlinear Acoustic Echo Canceller Using Sigmoid Transform in Conjunction With RLS Algorithm

Nonlinearity of amplifiers and/or loudspeakers gives rise to nonlinear echo in acoustic systems, which seriously degrades the performance of speech and audio communications. Many nonlinear acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) methods have been proposed. In this paper, a simple yet efficient nonlinear echo cancellation scheme is presented by using an adaptable sigmoid function in conjunction with a conventional transversal adaptive filter. The new scheme uses the least mean square (LMS) algorithm to update the parameters of sigmoid function and the recursive least square (RLS) algorithm to determine the coefficient vector of the transversal filter. The proposed AEC is proved to be convergent under some mild assumptions. Computer simulations show that the proposed scheme gives a superior echo cancellation performance over the well known Volterra filter approach when the echo path suffers from the saturation-type nonlinear distortion. More importantly, the new AEC has a much lower computational complexity than the Volterra-filter-based method.