A centralized acoustic echo canceller exploiting masking properties of the human ear

The design of a shared, centralized acoustic echo canceller (AEC) for use in modem digital communication networks faces new challenges. Specially, the performance of conventional approaches for AEC is severely degraded by vocoder nonlinearities along the transmission chain. In this paper, based on the analysis of the nonlinear echo path and the performance of the Wiener-type post-filter in the presence of vocoders, we propose a centralized AEC which incorporates a psychoacoustic post-filter. Computer experiments show that the proposed AEC is very promising for practical use in terms of high acoustic echo suppression, robust performance and ease of implementation.