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This paper introduces a novel method for acoustic echo control that utilizes sound object identification to suppress howling in conferencing environments with complex acoustic paths. By muting channels by default and only allowing playback of non-duplicate sound objects, the approach effectively prevents echo loops that arise from inter-terminal communication. The results demonstrate significant howling suppression while highlighting a trade-off with speech quality, marking a shift from traditional echo cancellation techniques.
Sound object identification can eliminate howling in conferencing setups by intelligently managing audio playback, challenging conventional echo cancellation methods.
This paper proposes acoustic echo control based on sound object identification for suppressing acoustic echo and howling in conferencing environments with complicated acoustic paths, where multiple hands-free terminals coexist in the same room. Conventional acoustic echo cancellers target fixed intra-device echo paths; however, unintended paths, for example, those formed via inter-terminal communication, are difficult to control and can lead to howling. Instead of estimating echo paths, the proposed approach identifies sound objects and keeps channels muted by default, allowing pass/playback only when the signal is judged not dentical to recently observed objects. This breaks echo loops caused by repeated reproduction of the same sound object and can be viewed as an extension of classical voice switching toward conditional half-duplex operation. Technical challenges and connections to related techniques are discussed, and a simulation shows howling suppression together with a trade-off against speech quality.