Deep Learning for Joint Acoustic Echo and Acoustic Howling Suppression in Hybrid Meetings

Hybrid meetings have become increasingly necessary during the post-COVID period and also brought new challenges for solving audio-related problems. In particular, the interplay between acoustic echo and acoustic howling in a hybrid meeting makes the joint suppression of them difficult. This paper proposes a deep learning approach to tackle this problem by formulating a recurrent feedback suppression process as an instantaneous speech separation task using the teacher-forced training strategy. Specifically, a self-attentive recurrent neural network is utilized to extract the target speech from microphone recordings with accessible and learned reference signals, thus suppressing acoustic echo and acoustic howling simultaneously. Different combinations of input signals and loss functions have been investigated for performance improvement. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for suppressing echo and howling jointly in hybrid meetings.