Patent ID: 7813499

Claim:
A system for suppressing a portion of a microphone signal corresponding to a speaker audio signal played aloud in a space having a microphone therein which picks-up a speaker signal playback and generates a microphone signal, said system comprising: a general purpose computing device; and a computer program comprising program modules executable by the computing device, said modules comprising, an acoustic echo canceller (AEC) module which suppresses some parts of the speaker signal playback found in the microphone signal and generates an AEC output signal, and a regression-based residual echo suppression (RES) module which accepts the AEC output signal and the speaker signal, and suppresses at least a portion of a residual part of the speaker signal playback found in the microphone signal left unsuppressed by the AEC module to produce a RES output signal, wherein the RES module comprises sub-modules which, for each segment of the AEC output signal in the order it is generated: (a) select a previously unselected one of a sequence of pre-defined sub-bands found within a prescribed overall frequency range; (b) predict an echo residual component associated with the selected sub-band in the AEC output signal as exhibited in a prescribed signal attribute using a prescribed regression technique and based on a prescribed number of past segments of the far end signal; (c) use the results of said prediction from a measure of the same signal attribute in the segment of the AEC output signal currently under consideration to remove residual echo from the RES output; (d) determine if there are any remaining previously unselected sub-bands; (e) whenever it is determined there are remaining previously unselected sub-bands, repeat the execution of sub-modules (a) through (d) until there are no previously unselected sub-band-ranges remaining; (f) combine the RES output signal components generated for each previously selected sub-band; and (g) designate the combined RES output signal components as the RES output for the segment of the AEC output signal currently under consideration.