ADAPTIVE AMBIENT SOUND SUPPRESSION AND SPEECH TRACKING

A device for suppressing ambient sounds from speech received by a microphone array is provided. One embodiment of the device comprises a microphone array, a processor, an analog-to-digital converter, and memory comprising instructions stored therein that are executable by the processor. The instructions stored in the memory are configured to receive a plurality of digital sound signals, each digital sound signal based on an analog sound signal originating at the microphone array, receive a multi-channel speaker signal, generate a monophonic approximation signal of the multi-channel speaker signal, apply a linear acoustic echo canceller to suppress a first ambient sound portion of each digital sound signal, generate a combined directionally-adaptive sound signal from a combination of each digital sound signal by a combination of time-invariant and adaptive beamforming techniques, and apply one or more nonlinear noise suppression techniques to suppress a second ambient sound portion of the combined directionally-adaptive sound signal.