Multi-Scale Refinement Network Based Acoustic Echo Cancellation

Abstract

Recently, deep encoder-decoder networks have shown outstanding performance in acoustic echo cancellation (AEC). However, the subsampling operations like convolution striding in the encoder layers significantly decrease the feature resolution lead to fine-grained information loss. This paper proposes an encoder-decoder network for acoustic echo cancellation with mutli-scale refinement paths to exploit the information at different feature scales. In the encoder stage, high-level features are obtained to get a coarse result. Then, the decoder layers with multiple refinement paths can directly refine the result with fine-grained features. Refinement paths with different feature scales are combined by learnable weights. The experimental results show that using the proposed multi-scale refinement structure can significantly improve the objective criteria. In the ICASSP 2022 Acoustic echo cancellation Challenge, our submitted system achieves an overall MOS score of 4.439 with 4.37 million parameters at a system latency of 40ms.