Removing the GSC Noise Reduction deficiencies in Reverberant Environments by Proposing Joint AEC-GSC algorithm

In this paper, a new joint structure for noise reduction in a reverberant environment will be proposed. The proposed structure consists of an acoustic echo canceller (AEC) followed by a noise reduction stage like generalized side-lobe canceller (GSC). This configuration is called AEC-GSC. It improves noise cancellation of the GSC beamformer in the presence of acoustic echoes in highly reverberant environments where GSC-alone fails to work properly. The AEC section is accomplished by our recently proposed segment variable step-size proportionate normalized least mean squares (SVS-PNIMS) algorithm. The proposed AEC-GSC algorithm is evaluated through both computer simulations and experimental results. The results demonstrate that the proposed AEC-GSC algorithm performs significantly better than GSC-alone in terms of speech distortion parameters and resulting ERLE.