W-disjoint orthogonality based residual acoustic echo cancellation for hands-free communication

A simple and novel residual acoustic echo cancellation method that employs binary masking is proposed to enhance the speech quality of hands-free communication in an automobile environment. In general, the W-disjoint orthogonality assumption is used for blind source separation using multi-microphones. However, in this Letter, it is utilized to mask the residual echo component in the time-frequency domain using a single microphone. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of the echo return loss enhancement and speech enhancement.