Perceptually-Motivated Nonlinear Channel Decorrelation For Stereo Acoustic Echo Cancellation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a psychoacoustically motivated nonlinear processing method that effectively reduces stereo channel coherence for acoustic echo cancellation without degrading audio quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel combination of a shaped comb-allpass filter and masked noise injection, leveraging psychoacoustic cues to improve stereo echo cancellation.

Findings

Significantly reduces inter-channel coherence

Maintains audio quality while improving echo cancellation

Outperforms existing coherence reduction methods

Abstract

Acoustic echo cancellation with stereo signals is generally an under-determined problem because of the high coherence between the left and right channels. In this paper, we present a novel method of significantly reducing inter-channel coherence without affecting the audio quality. Our work takes into account psychoacoustic masking and binaural auditory cues. The proposed non-linear processing combines a shaped comb-allpass (SCAL) filter with the injection of psychoacoustically masked noise. We show that the proposed method performs significantly better than other known methods for reducing inter-channel coherence.