On Dealing with Sampling Rate Mismatches in Blind Source Separation and Acoustic Echo Cancellation

The lack of a common clock reference is a fundamental problem when dealing with audio streams originating from or heading to different distributed sound capture or playback devices. When implementing multichannel signal processing algorithms for such kind of audio streams it is necessary to account for the unavoidable mismatches between the actual sampling rates. There are some approaches that can help to correct these mismatches, but important problems remain to be solved, among them the accurate estimation of the mismatch factors, and achieving both accuracy and computational efficiency in their correction. In this paper we present an empirical study on the performance of blind source separation and acoustic echo cancellation algorithms in this scenario. We also analyze the degradation in performance when using an approximate but efficient method to correct the rate mismatches.