ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

A Two-stage Progressive Neural Network for Acoustic Echo Cancellation

Zhuangqi Chen, Xianjun Xia, Cheng Chen, Xianke Wang, Yanhong Leng, Li Chen, Roberto Togneri, Yijian Xiao, Piao Ding, Shenyi Song, Pingjian Zhang

Recent studies in deep learning based acoustic echo cancellation proves the benefits of introducing a linear echo cancellation module. However, the convergence problem and potential target speech distortion impose an additional learning burden for the neural network. In this paper, we propose a two-stage progressive neural network consisting of a coarse-stage and a fine-stage module. For the coarse-stage, a light-weighted network module is designed to suppress partial echo and potential noise, where a voice activity detection path is used to enhance the learned features. For the fine-stage, a larger network is employed to deal with the more complex echo path and restore the near-end speech. We have conducted extensive experiments to verify the proposed method, and the results show that the proposed two-stage method provides a superior performance to other state-of-the-art methods.