Stereophonic Acoustic Echo Suppression Based on Wiener Filter in the Short-Time Fourier Transform Domain

Abstract

An open-loop stereophonic acoustic echo suppression (SAES) method without preprocessing is presented for teleconferencing systems, where the Wiener filter in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain is employed. Instead of identifying the echo path impulse responses with adaptive filters, the proposed algorithm estimates the echo spectra from the stereo signals using two weighting functions. The spectral modification technique originally proposed for noise reduction is adopted to remove the echo from the microphone signal. Moreover, a priori signal-to-echo ratio (SER) based Wiener filter is used as the gain function to achieve a trade-off between musical noise reduction and computational load for real-time operations. Computer simulation shows the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed method in several different scenarios.