Nonlinear residual echo suppression based on dual-stream DPRNN

Abstract The acoustic echo cannot be entirely removed by linear adaptive filters due to the nonlinear relationship between the echo and the far-end signal. Usually, a post-processing module is required to further suppress the echo. In this paper, we propose a residual echo suppression method based on the modification of dual-path recurrent neural network (DPRNN) to improve the quality of speech communication. Both the residual signal and the auxiliary signal, the far-end signal or the output of the adaptive filter, obtained from the linear acoustic echo cancelation are adopted to form a dual-stream for the DPRNN. We validate the efficacy of the proposed method in the notoriously difficult double-talk situations and discuss the impact of different auxiliary signals on performance. We also compare the performance of the time domain and the time-frequency domain processing. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and applicable way to deploy our method to off-the-shelf loudspeakers by fine-tuning the pre-trained model with little recorded-echo data.