Synthesized stereo combined with acoustic echo cancellation for desktop conferencing

One promising application in modern communications is desktop conferencing, which can involve several participants over a widely distributed area. Single-channel monophonic sound certainly is not sufficient for a listener to spatially separate one remote talker from another. Moreover, it is very difficult to understand two (or more) remote speakers talking at the same time. Synthesized stereophonic sound will help considerably in solving these problems. In such a scenario, we assume we are located in a hands-free environment, where the composite acoustic signal is presented over loudspeakers, thus requiring acoustic echo cancellation. In this paper, we explain some of the methods that can be used to synthesize stereo sound and how such methods can be combined efficiently with stereo acoustic echo cancellation in the face of several difficult problems.