Significance-aware filtering for nonlinear acoustic echo cancellation

This article summarizes and extends the recently proposed concept of Significance-Aware (SA) filtering for nonlinear acoustic echo cancellation. The core idea of SA filtering is to decompose the estimation of the nonlinear echo path into beneficially interacting subsystems, each of which can be adapted with high computational efficiency. The previously proposed SA Hammerstein Group Models (SA-HGMs) decompose the nonlinear acoustic echo path into a direct-path part, modeled by a Hammerstein Group Model (HGM) and a complementary part, modeled by a very efficient Hammerstein model. In this article, we furthermore propose a novel Equalization-based SA (ESA) structure, where the echo path is equalized by a linear filter to allow for an estimation of the loudspeaker nonlinearities by very small and efficient models. Additionally, we provide a novel in-depth analysis of the computational complexity of the previously proposed SA and the novel ESA filters and compare both SA filtering approaches to each other, to adaptive HGMs, and to linear filters, where fast partitioned-block frequency-domain realizations of the competing filter structures are considered. Finally, the echo reduction performance of the proposed SA filtering approaches is verified using real recordings from a commercially available smartphone. Beyond the scope of previous publications on SA-HGMs, the ability of the SA filters to generalize for double-talk situations is explicitly considered as well. The low complexity as well as the good echo reduction performance of both SA filters illustrate the potential of SA filtering in practice.