Deep Learning Technologies for Acoustic Echo Cancellation in Dynamic Environments

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In a full-duplex hands-free voice communication system, a speaker located in a room at one end of the link may receive an echo of his/her voice due to the acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone at the other end of the link. The goal of acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) is to remove such undesirable echo in order to improve the quality and intelligibility of the voice communication, as well as the performance of related applications, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). While numerous AEC algorithms based on traditional adaptive filtering techniques have been proposed in the past, recent studies on the application of deep neural networks (DNN) to this problem have shown remarkable performance, especially under adverse conditions, i.e., high levels of noise and reverberation, nonlinear characteristics of audio devices, etc. However, the limited ability of these DNN to generalize to the wide dynamics of the acoustic environment still remains an open issue for research and a specific problem of concern to our partner, Fluent.ai, whose focus is on developing the next generation of voice user interfaces (VUI). Within this framework, the main objective of this project is to develop new DNN-based AEC algorithms to overcome the above limitation for real-time applications. Our proposed work includes: (1) incorporating additional information provided by on-line estimation of the acoustic impulse response into the DNN-based AEC framework, and (2) determining the most suitable DNN architecture for implementing this approach. The new algorithms developed in this project will be used by Fluent.ai to establish and eventually commercialize a new line of embedded VUI for voice communications and ASR, thereby enabling the company to attract additional customers and grow its business. In addition to address the company's specific need, this short-term project will foster the development of a new research partnership between the academic researchers at McGill University and the scientific members at Fluent.ai, bringing significant long-term benefits to Canada.