Simple and Efficient Double-Talk-Detector for Acoustic Echo Cancellation

Abstract

Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) is a topic that has received a great interest in recent years. However, a significant challenge remains with the problem of double-talk especially when the adaptive filter has a fast convergence rate. In this case, the double-talk detector (DTD) must reply in early stage and halt updating of the adaptive filter in order to avoid filter coefficients divergence. Indeed, a complex and inappropriate DTD can seriously affect the convergence rate of the adaptive filter and global performances of the AEC system. In this paper, an implementation of a simple and efficient DTD based on a recursive estimation of the decision variable which is resulting from the level comparison between far-end and microphone signals is proposed. The presented algorithm is then compared with the normalized cross-correlation (NCC) method which is taken as a reference in this work. In the simulation tests, the recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm is used to update the adaptive filter coefficients. The speech signals used in the tests are taken from the TIMIT database.