Convention Paper
Efficient Combination of Acoustic Echo Control and Parametric Spatial Audio Coding
AES Convention 128 · Paper 8100 · May 2010
Abstract
High-quality teleconferencing systems utilise surround sound to provide natural communication experience. Directional Audio Coding (DirAC) is an efficient parametric approach to capture and reproduce spatial sound. It uses a monophonic audio signal together with parametric spatial cue information. For reproduction, multiple loudspeaker signals are determined based on the DirAC stream. To allow for hands-free operation, multi-channel acoustic echo control (AEC) has to be employed. Standard approaches apply multi-channel adaptive filtering to address this problem. However, computational complexity constraints and convergence issues inhibit practical applications. This paper proposes an efficient combination of AEC and DirAC by explicitly exploiting its parametric sound field representation. The approach suppresses the echo components in the microphone signals solely based on the single channel audio signal used for the DirAC synthesis of the loudspeaker signals.
