System and method for acoustic echo cancelation using deep multitask recurrent neural networks

Abstract

A system for performing echo cancellation includes: a processor configured to: receive a far-end signal; record a microphone signal including: a near-end signal; and an echo signal corresponding to the far-end signal; extract far-end features from the far-end signal; extract microphone features from the microphone signal; compute estimated near-end features by supplying the microphone features and the far-end features to an acoustic echo cancellation module including a recurrent neural network including: an encoder including a plurality of gated recurrent units; and a decoder including a plurality of gated recurrent units; compute an estimated near-end signal from the estimated near-end features; and transmit the estimated near-end signal to the far-end device. The recurrent neural network may include a contextual attention module; and the recurrent neural network may take, as input, a plurality of error features computed based on the far-end features, the microphone features, and acoustic path parameters.