Speakerphone with adaptive cancellation of room echoes

Abstract

An arrangement for generating an electrical audio signal in response to a sound signal applied to a microphone in a reverberating room removes the reverberations with an adaptive filter. The filter learns or adapts so as to cancel the room echoes by receiving both the audio signal affected by reverberation and a clean audio signal from a highly directional local-acting microphone placed near the source of the sound. The signal to be filtered is applied to a transversal filter including a tapped delay line having variable taps or multipliers to produce incrementally delayed multiplied samples. The multiplied samples are summed, and the sum signal is subtracted from the clean signal to produce a difference signal. A .mu.P is programmed to iteratively calculate the effects of changes to the tap values and to select tap values which tend to reduce the magnitude of the difference signal. When the filter is converged, the difference signal is near zero. At this time, the filtered signal and the clean signal are similar, and therefore the filter characteristic removes the effect of reverberation. The tap values are then fixed, and the signal with room reverberations can be made clean by the adapted filter.