Joint Blind Signal Separation And Echo Cancellation

Abstract

The problem of joint blind signal separation and acoustic echo cancellation arises in applications such as teleconferencing and voice-controlled machinery. Typically, in the same room as the local speakers there are loudspeakers reproducing far-end speech or music signals. The contributions of these loudspeaker signals to the microphone signals need to be canceled. The remaining signals are then separated so that the individual local speakers are recovered. In the previous chapter the CoBliSS blind signal separation algorithm is introduced. In this chapter an extension of CoBliSS is presented (ECoBliSS) which can simultaneously deal with blind signal separation and echo cancellation. The computational complexity of ECoBliSS is less than that of CoBliSS when processing the same number of signals. The performance of the extended CoBliSS algorithm is evaluated using audio recorded in a real acoustic environment. This chapter is based on Schobben and Sommen, 1999a.