Hands-free telephones -- joint control of echo cancellation and postfiltering. (Q1583547)

This paper deals with an efficient and robust joint control of the step sizes of subband adaptive echo compensation filters and the frequency response of the echo suppression filter of a hands-free telephone system. It is shown that both control methods are described by the same quantity: the ratio of the short-term estimates of the power of the error to the ``undisturbed'' error signal. Since the latter is not directly measurable, a three-step procedure for its estimation is given. It uses speech activity detection, a ``shadow'' filter, and a correlation analysis. The procedure described has been implemented. It produced a considerable reduction in the amount of necessary signal processing. Furthermore, it was possible to provide natural communication with hands-free telephone systems.