Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Fei, Wang, Zhong-Qiu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03244
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914137750110208
author Zhao, Fei
Wang, Zhong-Qiu
author_facet Zhao, Fei
Wang, Zhong-Qiu
contents Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) remains challenging in real-world environments due to nonlinear distortions caused by low-cost loudspeakers and complex room acoustics. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a dual-microphone configuration, where an auxiliary reference microphone is placed near the loudspeaker to capture the nonlinearly distorted far-end signal. Although this reference signal is contaminated by near-end speech, we propose a preprocessing module based on Wiener filtering to estimate a compressed time-frequency mask to suppress near-end components. This purified reference signal enables a more effective linear AEC stage, whose residual error signal is then fed to a deep neural network for joint residual echo and noise suppression. Evaluation results show that our method outperforms baseline approaches on matched test sets. To evaluate its robustness under strong nonlinearities, we further test it on a mismatched dataset and observe that it achieves substantial performance gains. These results demonstrate its effectiveness in practical scenarios where the nonlinear distortions are typically unknown.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03244
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why Not Put a Microphone Near the Loudspeaker? A New Paradigm for Acoustic Echo Cancellation
Zhao, Fei
Wang, Zhong-Qiu
Sound
Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) remains challenging in real-world environments due to nonlinear distortions caused by low-cost loudspeakers and complex room acoustics. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a dual-microphone configuration, where an auxiliary reference microphone is placed near the loudspeaker to capture the nonlinearly distorted far-end signal. Although this reference signal is contaminated by near-end speech, we propose a preprocessing module based on Wiener filtering to estimate a compressed time-frequency mask to suppress near-end components. This purified reference signal enables a more effective linear AEC stage, whose residual error signal is then fed to a deep neural network for joint residual echo and noise suppression. Evaluation results show that our method outperforms baseline approaches on matched test sets. To evaluate its robustness under strong nonlinearities, we further test it on a mismatched dataset and observe that it achieves substantial performance gains. These results demonstrate its effectiveness in practical scenarios where the nonlinear distortions are typically unknown.
title Why Not Put a Microphone Near the Loudspeaker? A New Paradigm for Acoustic Echo Cancellation
topic Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03244