Echo suppression and cancellation


Echo suppression and echo cancellation are methods used in telephony to improve voice quality by preventing echo from being created or removing it after it is already present. In addition to improving subjective audio quality, echo suppression increases the capacity achieved through silence suppression by preventing echo from traveling across a network. Echo suppressors were developed in the 1950s in response to the first use of satellites for telecommunications, but they have since been largely supplanted by better performing echo cancellers.
Echo suppression and cancellation methods are commonly called acoustic echo suppression and acoustic echo cancellation, and more rarely line echo cancellation. In some cases, these terms are more precise, as there are various types and causes of echo with unique characteristics, including acoustic echo and line echo. In practice, however, the same techniques are used to treat all types of echo, so an acoustic echo canceller can cancel line echo as well as acoustic echo. AEC in particular is commonly used to refer to echo cancelers in general, regardless of whether they were intended for acoustic echo, line echo, or both.
Although echo suppressors and echo cancellers have similar goals—preventing a speaking individual from hearing an echo of their own voice—the methods they use are different:
ITU standards and describe requirements and tests for echo cancellers in digital and PSTN applications, respectively.

History

In telephony, echo is the reflected copy of one's voice heard some time later. If the delay is fairly significant, it is considered annoying. If the delay is very small, the phenomenon is called sidetone. If the delay is slightly longer, around 50 milliseconds, humans cannot hear the echo as a distinct sound, but instead hear a chorus effect.
In the earlier days of telecommunications, echo suppression was used to reduce the objectionable nature of echos to human users. One person speaks while the other listens, and they speak back and forth. An echo suppressor attempts to determine which is the primary direction and allows that channel to go forward. In the reverse channel, it places attenuation to block or suppress any signal on the assumption that the signal is echo. Although the suppressor effectively deals with echo, this approach leads to several problems which may be frustrating for both parties to a call.
In response to this, Bell Labs developed echo canceler theory in the early 1960s, which then resulted in laboratory echo cancelers in the late 1960s and commercial echo cancelers in the 1980s. An echo canceller works by generating an estimate of the echo from the talker's signal, and subtracts that estimate from the return path. This technique requires adaptive signal processing to generate a signal accurate enough to effectively cancel the echo, where the echo can differ from the original due to various kinds of degradation along the way. Since invention at AT&T Bell Labs echo cancellation algorithms have been improved and honed. Like all echo cancelling processes, these first algorithms were designed to anticipate the signal which would inevitably re-enter the transmission path, and cancel it out.
Rapid advances in digital signal processing allowed echo cancellers to be made smaller and more cost-effective. In the 1990s, echo cancellers were implemented within voice switches for the first time rather than as standalone devices. The integration of echo cancellation directly into the switch meant that echo cancellers could be reliably turned on or off on a call-by-call basis, removing the need for separate trunk groups for voice and data calls. Today's telephony technology often employs echo cancellers in small or handheld communications devices via a software voice engine, which provides cancellation of either acoustic echo or the residual echo introduced by a far-end PSTN gateway system; such systems typically cancel echo reflections with up to 64 milliseconds delay.

Operation

The echo cancellation process works as follows:
  1. A far-end signal is delivered to the system.
  2. The far-end signal is reproduced.
  3. The far-end signal is filtered and delayed to resemble the near-end signal.
  4. The filtered far-end signal is subtracted from the near-end signal.
  5. The resultant signal represents sounds present in the room excluding any direct or reverberated sound.
The primary challenge for an echo canceller is determining the nature of the filtering to be applied to the far-end signal such that it resembles the resultant near-end signal. The filter is essentially a model of speaker, microphone and the room's acoustical attributes. Echo cancellers must be adaptive because the characteristics of the near-end's speaker and microphone are generally not known in advance. The acoustical attributes of the near-end's room are also not generally known in advance, and may change. By using the far-end signal as the stimulus, modern systems use an adaptive filter and can 'converge' from nothing to 55 dB of cancellation in around 200 ms.
Until recently echo cancellation only needed to apply to the voice bandwidth of telephone circuits. PSTN calls transmit frequencies between 300 Hz and 3 kHz, the range required for human speech intelligibility. Videoconferencing is one area where full bandwidth audio is used. In this case, specialized products are employed to perform echo cancellation.
Because echo suppression has known limitations, in an ideal situation, echo cancellation alone will be used. However, this is insufficient in many applications, notably software phones on networks with long delay and meager throughput. Here, echo cancellation and suppression can work in conjunction to achieve acceptable performance.

Quantifying echo

Echo is measured as . This is the ratio, expressed in decibels, of original and it's echo. High values mean the echo is very weak, while low values mean the echo is very strong. Negative indicate the echo is stronger than the original signal, which if left unchecked would cause audio feedback.
The performance of an echo canceller is measured in echo return loss enhancement, which is the amount of additional signal loss applied by the echo canceller. Most echo cancellers are able to apply 18 to 35 dB ERLE.
The total signal loss of the echo is the sum of the ERL and ERLE.

Current uses

Sources of echo are found in everyday surroundings such as:
In some of these cases, sound from the loudspeaker enters the microphone almost unaltered. The difficulties in canceling echo stem from the alteration of the original sound by the ambient space. These changes can include certain frequencies being absorbed by soft furnishings and reflection of different frequencies at varying strength.
Implementing AEC requires engineering expertise and a fast processor, usually in the form of a digital signal processor, this cost in processing capability may come at a premium, however, many embedded systems do have a fully functional AEC.
Smart speakers and interactive voice response systems that accept speech for input use AEC while speech prompts are played to prevent the system's own speech recognition from falsely recognizing the echoed prompts and other output.

Modems

Echo control on voice-frequency data calls that use dial-up modems may cause data corruption. Some telephone devices disable echo suppression or echo cancellation when they detect the 2100 or 2225 Hz answer tones associated with such calls, in accordance with ITU-T recommendation G.164 or G.165.
In the 1990s most echo cancellation was done inside modems of type v.32 and later. In voiceband modems this allowed using the same frequencies in both directions simultaneously, greatly increasing the data rate. As part of connection negotiation, each modem sent line probe signals, measured the echoes, and set up its delay lines. Echoes, in this case, did not include long echoes caused by acoustic coupling but did include short echoes caused by impedance mismatches in the 2-wire local loop to the telephone exchange.
After the turn of the century, DSL modems also made extensive use of automated echo cancellation. Though they used separate incoming and outgoing frequencies, these frequencies were beyond the voiceband for which the cables were designed, and often suffered attenuation distortion due to bridge taps and incomplete impedance matching. Deep, narrow frequency gaps often resulted, that could not be made usable by echo cancellation. These were detected and mapped out during connection negotiation.