Go To Program 60 A Functional Link Based Nonlinear Echo Canceller Exploiting Sparsity Danilo Comminiello 1 Michele Scarpiniti 1 Raffaele Parisi 1 Aurelio Uncini 1 1 INFOCOM Dpt., "Sapienza" University of Rome, Rome, Rome, Italy The presence of loudspeaker distortions in the echo path affects the performance of a conventional acoustic echo canceller (AEC). In order to address this problem we introduce a nonlinear acoustic echo cancellation (NAEC) architecture based on the adaptive combination of linear and nonlinear filters. The nonlinear filtering is performed by a functional link network (FLN) whose task is to compensate for the loudspeaker distortions. The linear contribution is given by a variable step size improved proportionate normalized least mean square (VIP-NLMS) algorithm which takes into account the impulse response sparsity thus further improving the system performance. Experimental results show the effectiveness of this system in the presence of loudspeaker distortions. View pdf