In acoustic echo cancelation applications, the presence of near-end speech
causes divergence of the adaptive filter which is used to model the echo pa
th. A robust acoustic echo canceler is the one which is equipped with an al
gorithm that detects periods of double talk and puts the adaptive algorithm
into a double-talk handling mode. This paper proposes a double-talk detect
or based on an angle measure between two vectors comprising samples of inpu
t signal to the near-end microphone and the estimated echo at the output of
the adaptive filter. Whenever the double talk is detected, the adaptive al
gorithm is frozen. The proposed detector has a quick reaction to the onset
and cessation of the double talk and we illustrate this with a few simulati
ons with pre-recorded speech segments. Performance of the subband adaptive
filter (Navaneetha Krishnan et al., Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE DSP Work
shop, Utah, August, 1998) with the proposed double-talk detector is compare
d with that of Doherty and Porayath (IEEE Trans. Circuits Systems-II (May 1
997) 389-396). We used ERLE and coefficient error vector norm as the perfor
mance measures. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.