Efficient combination of acoustic echo control and parametric spatial audio coding

High-quality teleconferencing systems utilize surround sound to provide natural communication experience. Directional Audio Coding (DirAC) is an efficient parametric approach to capture and reproduce spatial sound. It uses a monophonic audio signal together with parametric spatial cue information. For reproduction, multiple loudspeaker signals are determined based on the DirAC stream. To allow for hands-free operation, multichannel acoustic echo control (AEC) has to be employed. Standard approaches apply multichannel adaptive filtering to address this problem. However, computational complexity constraints and convergence issues inhibit practical applications. This paper proposes an efficient combination of AEC and DirAC by explicitly exploiting its parametric sound field representation. The approach suppresses the echo components in the microphone signals solely based on the single channel audio signal used for the DirAC synthesis of the loudspeaker signals.