Patent ID: 7801242

Claim:
A method for estimating a channel spectrum, the method comprising: (a) receiving an input signal at an input of a device; (b) the device averaging a first stream of power spectra of the input signal to generate a second stream of averaged power spectra, wherein each averaged power spectrum of the second stream comprises an average of a plurality of the power spectra of the first stream; (c) the device multiplying a selected one of the averaged power spectra in the second stream by a spectral weighting function to obtain a weighted power spectrum; (d) the device computing an inverse transform on the weighted power spectrum to obtain an autocorrelation signal; (e) the device analyzing peaks in the autocorrelation signal to determine a significant subset of the peaks; (f) the device computing echo delay times and echo coefficients from the significant subset of the peaks; (g) the device computing a channel spectrum estimate using the echo delay times and echo coefficients; wherein the channel spectrum estimate is used to compute an estimate of an original transmission signal to permit recovery of information from the estimate of the original transmission signal.