A hybrid acoustic echo canceller and suppressor

Wideband communication is becoming a desired feature in telephone conferencing systems. This paper proposes a computationally efficient echo suppression control algorithm to be used when increasing the bandwidth of an audio conferencing system, e.g. a conference telephone. The method presented in this paper gives a quality improvement, in the form of increased bandwidth, at a negligible extra computational cost. The increase in bandwidth is obtained through combining a conventional acoustic echo cancellation unit and an acoustic echo suppression unit, i.e. a hybrid echo canceller and suppressor. The proposed solution was implemented in a real-time system. Frequency analysis combined with subjective tests showed that the proposed method extends the bandwidth, while maintaining high quality.