Multichannel acoustic echo suppression

Acoustic echo suppression (AES) provides an attractive alternative to acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) techniques for full-duplex communication in low-complexity systems. However, so far AES techniques are commonly known to introduce significant distortions to the desired signal. Moreover, most traditional echo control techniques typically require accurately detecting the contribution of the near-end speaker to the microphone signal (“double talk”). The extension of AES techniques to the multichannel case usually assumes a symmetric system design which is often not fulfilled by typical scenarios. In this paper we propose a novel approach to multichannel acoustic echo suppression, which aims at extracting the near-end signal using a constraint for a distortionless output, without requiring a double-talk detector, or a symmetric system design. In addition to the above mentioned properties, the multichannel AES is also shown to overcome the known challenges in conventional multichannel acoustic echo control setups.