An integrated acoustic echo and noise cancellation system using cross-band adaptive filters and wavelet thresholding of multitaper spectrum

An efficient integrated system for acoustic echo and noise cancellation in hands free devices is proposed in this paper. Adaptive filters are usually employed in such systems for the acoustic echo cancellation. In order to reduce the computational complexity, sub band adaptive filters are commonly used since the order of filter required will be less but at the cost of distortion due to aliasing effect. In this work, cross-band adaptive filters are developed in wavelet domain/wavelet packet domain in tune with psychoacoustic model, to reduce the above distortion and thereby effectively estimate the echo and cancel it. The system uses wavelet thresholding technique for smoothening the log multitaper spectrum which eliminates the annoying musical noise in the processed output. To achieve efficient echo and noise cancellation, a novel switching mechanism to switch between wavelet filter bank and perceptual wavelet packet filter bank with most matching wavelet basis, from a dictionary of wavelet bases, depending on the type of noise present in each frame of the noisy speech is designed and developed in this work. The performance of the proposed integrated system is evaluated in terms of Acoustic Interference Cancellation (AIC) and Noise Attenuation (NA) under different Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. The system exhibits very good performance even at very low SNRs close to -10 dB when compared with other such competitive systems.