Method of an acoustic echo suppression based on recurrent neural network and clustering

The article solves the problem of acoustic echo suppression based on a neural network that evaluates an ideal binary mask IBM using features extracted from a mixture of near-end and far-end signals. The novelty of the proposed method lies in the use of the clustering algorithm in addition to the bidirectional recurrent neural network BLSTM. To evaluate the use of the EM, Mean-Shift, k-Means clustering algorithms, the models have been trained and tested on the TIMIT database. For each model, the ERLE, PESQ, STOI metrics have been calculated to characterize its quality. The use of the EM and Mean-Shift clustering algorithms appeared to be inefficient compared to the BLSTM algorithm at a signal-to-echo ratio of 10 dB. With a signal-to-echo ratio of 6 dB, BLSTM+Mean-Shift resulted in a marginal improvement in the PESQ metric compared to the BLSTM algorithm. The results of the experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed BLSTM model when using a network with the K-Means algorithm, compared to using a pure BLSTM for echo cancellation in double-talk scenarios. With a signal-to-echo ratio of 10 dB, the STOI metric, which characterizes speech intelligibility, has improved by 7%, and the PESQ metric, which characterizes the quality of speech restoration, by 18.8%.