Integrating Acoustic Echo Cancellation with Adaptive Beamforming Microphone Arrays

An overview is given on the fundamental problems when combining acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) with adaptive beamforming microphone array (ABMA) in fullduplex communications. For reasons of computational complexity and functionality, a compromise is necessary between one echo canceller per microphone signal and a single echo canceller for the beamforming output. Here, the decomposition of the adaptive beamforming into a time-invariant beam-steering and a time-variant voting is proposed. Some synergies arising from the combination of ABMA and AEC are highlighted.