What Is Echo Cancellation?

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Echo cancellation keeps your conversations secret so only you and the intended recipient can hear what you say. Echo cancellation technology is used in telephony and telecommunication to improve voice quality by preventing echoes from being captured, created, or possibly removed in post-processing. An echo can be acoustic or hybrid, where a line echo and electrical reflection combine to form one kind of echo. The hybrid echo cancellers are the most challenging. They require a high degree of modeling accuracy and computational complexity. Two interfering signals must separate before striping out an attenuated echo signal from the combined input signal. A low-pass filter with a cut-off frequency set to the highest possible frequency still allows accurate voice reproduction. In this way, only the low-frequency components of the acoustic echo will be allowed to pass through the filter, while the high-frequency ones will be reflected and canceled out. On the other hand, hybrid echoes are created by the interference of two signals with different frequencies. The interference produces a sum and a difference frequency. The low-pass filter will only allow the low-frequency component of the sum frequency to pass, thus reducing the hybrid echo but increasing the probability of feedback in loud environments. This enables the phone to be used in noisy environments without transmitting the noise to the other party. It is essential for the quality of a phone call that the other party hears only your voice and nothing else. This is achieved by transmitting the microphone input to the speaker output. The signal is then delayed and attenuated. An adaptive algorithm monitors the speaker output and corrects deviations from the ideal transfer function. The result is a phone call with minimum background noise interference and optimal voice transmission. With echo cancellation technology, your long-distance or across-town calls will stay clear and crisp no matter what obstacles are in between.

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