An acoustic front-end for interactive TV incorporating multichannel acoustic echo cancellation and blind signal extraction

In this contribution, an acoustic front-end for distant-talking interfaces as developed within the European Union-funded project DICIT (Distant-talking interfaces for Control of Interactive TV) is presented. It comprises state-of-the-art multichannel acoustic echo cancellation and blind source separation-based signal extraction and only requires two microphone signals. The proposed scheme is analyzed and evaluated for different realistic scenarios when a speech recognizer is used as back-end. The results show that the system significantly outperforms simple alternatives, i.e., a two-channel Delay & Sum beamformer for speech signal extraction.