An acoustic echo cancellation structure for synthetic surround sound

This paper proposes an acoustic echo cancellation structure for hands-free synthetic surround sound applications, such as multiple participant conferencing, and virtual reality applications. Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and other virtual reality applications can benefit from the addition of 3D spatial audio generated by more than two loudspeakers. When full-duplex audio is present in a system, however, acoustic echo cancellation is required to eliminate the feedback echo path. The acoustic echo cancellation structure proposed by this paper is based on the acoustic echo canceller per spatial region allocation scheme previously introduced by the authors for two channel synthetic stereo. This paper shows that the spatial region allocation scheme is extensible to any number of channels which makes it extremely versatile and flexible, especially for surround sound audio. Microsoft Direct X 7, a commonly used application programmer interface (API), was used in our simulations to generate the 3D spatial audio on a PC.