Lucent Technologies Inc.

At&t Bell Laboratories

James C Thi

Dennis Raymond Morgan

Egbert Ammicht

A signal processor for, e.g., a telephonic communication system interconnecting a near location and at least one far location includes an echo canceller for suppressing the re-transmission of received signals. The operation of the echo canceller is controlled according to whether the near location is transmitting or receiving, and whether the far location is transmitting or receiving. The signal processor includes means for detecting doubletalk, and for controlling the echo canceller in response to the detection of doubletalk, such that doubletalk is permitted. In one method of operation, a delay is applied to the inputs to the echo canceller from the near and far ends, such that each of these signals is used for determining the operating state of the echo canceller before being used to operate an adaptive filter of the echo canceller. In another method of operation, doubletalk detection is carried out, in part, by evaluating the performance of an auxiliary adaptive filter. In another method of operation, the doubletalk detection is carried out, in part, by evaluating a pair of statistics that respectively indicate whether the near-end input to the echo canceller contains more energy than an expected echo generated from the far-end input, and whether an echo is being effectively removed. According to such method, a doubletalk state is declared only is these statistics satisfy predetermined conditions.

Method and apparatus for echo removal in a communication system

A subband adaptive filter is disclosed that retains the computational and convergence speed advantages of subband processing while eliminating delay in the signal path. The technique has applications in active noise control where delay seriously limits cancellation performance and in acoustic echo cancellation where transmission delay specifications may limit the use of conventional subband designs. A reference signal and a residual error signal are each decomposed into a plurality of subband signals, and a set of adaptive weighting coefficients is generated for each of these subbands by a conventional complex LMS (least-mean-squared) technique. These sets of subband weighting coefficients are then transformed into the frequency domain, appropriately stacked and inverse transformed back into the time domain to obtain wideband filter coefficients for a programmable filter. The reference signal, which is correlated with the disturbance signal to be eliminated, is filtered by this programmable filter to produce a disturbance estimate signal which may be subtracted from the signal containing the disturbance. The process iterates in order to minimize the residual error signal and thereby reduce the disturbance.

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Gaithersburg, MD, United States of America

James C Thi