Synthetic stereo acoustic echo cancellation structure for multiple participant VoIP conferences

This paper proposes a novel acoustic echo cancellation structure intended f or multiple participant, full-duplex, hands-free voice over Internet protoc ol (VoIP) conferencing. A synthetic stereo image is generated through the u se of spatialization functions, which are used to assist the near-end user in distinguishing between far-end talkers. The proposed synthetic stereo st ructure, which uses a single echo canceler per spatial region, is compared to structures with a single echo canceler per channel and to stereophonic e cho cancelers. The proposed structure does not suffer from correlation of t he reference signals, which can cause system misconvergence in structures t hat use a single canceler per channel. Correlation of the reference signals is eliminated since monaural signals are transmitted at the far-end and st atic spatialization functions are used at the near-end to allocate each par ticipant to a spatial region.