Challenges of Acoustic Echo Cancellation in low cost applications

The paper describes problems of performing effective acoustic echo cancellation in time-delay sensitive applications where the quality of used acoustic components is low, the acoustic design may be pure and the cost of used digital components must be reduces as low as possible. The situation is typical for mass-market applications such as mobile and regular phones, office speakerphones and low cost conferencing systems. Using low cost components in compact enclosures introduces large amount of non-linear distortions into the loudspeaker signal causing pure performance of classical acoustic echo cancellation algorithms. Unfortunately, more sophisticated algorithms require more processing power and larger processing delays. The paper discusses possible trade-offs as well as solutions implemented in Alango Voice Communication Package.