Improving Acoustic Echo Cancellation in Hands-free Communication Systems

Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) is the technique used to improve the speech quality in communication systems. This technique removes the undesirable acoustic echo generated by the acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone of the terminal devices. In addition, AEC is generally based on adaptive filtering. This paper presents a new structure of AEC system to improve the performance of the conventional AEC. Simulation results using normalized least mean square (NLMS) algorithm demonstrate that better performance can be achieved by the proposed structure compared to the conventional structure of AEC. Therefore, three criteria measures are used to evaluate the proposed structure of AEC: misalignment, mean square error (MSE) and echo return loss enhancement (ERLE).