A deep complex multi-frame filtering network for stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation

Abstract

In hands-free communication system, the coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone will generate echo signal, which can severely impair the quality of communication. Meanwhile, various types of noise in the communication environment further destroy the speech quality and intelligibility. It is hard to extract the near-end signal from the microphone input signal within one step, especially in low signal-to-noise ratios. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage approach to address this issue. On the one hand, we decompose the echo cancellation into two stages, including linear echo cancellation module and residual echo suppression module. A multi-frame filtering strategy is introduced to benefit estimating linear echo by utilizing more inter-frame information. On the other hand, we decouple the complex spectral mapping into magnitude estimation and complex spectra refine. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves stage-of-the-art performance over previous advanced algorithms under various conditions.