Joint Online Multichannel Acoustic Echo Cancellation, Speech Dereverberation and Source Separation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a joint algorithm that simultaneously addresses acoustic echo cancellation, speech dereverberation, and source separation, improving performance and reducing computational complexity in multichannel speech processing.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cascaded approach using auxiliary function based ICA/IVA techniques, enabling flexible order and enhanced separation performance.

Findings

Lower computational complexity compared to joint methods

Better separation performance than vanilla joint algorithms

Flexible order of sub-processes in the cascade

Abstract

This paper presents a joint source separation algorithm that simultaneously reduces acoustic echo, reverberation and interfering sources. Target speeches are separated from the mixture by maximizing independence with respect to the other sources. It is shown that the separation process can be decomposed into cascading sub-processes that separately relate to acoustic echo cancellation, speech dereverberation and source separation, all of which are solved using the auxiliary function based independent component/vector analysis techniques, and their solving orders are exchangeable. The cascaded solution not only leads to lower computational complexity but also better separation performance than the vanilla joint algorithm.