CANEC Facts Sheet

Download CANEC Facts Sheet

CANEC Performance

CANEC is a next generation acoustic noise canceller (ANC) and acoustic echo canceller (AEC) combined in a single "light-weight" software module, designed to provide superior performance at very low resources. The audio samples below demonstrate CANEC performance.

microphone signal (8kHz) PLAY SAMPLE	CANEC output PLAY SAMPLE
Microphone signal (22kHz) PLAY SAMPLE	CANEC output PLAY SAMPLE
Microphone signal (22kHz) PLAY SAMPLE	CANEC output PLAY SAMPLE

CANEC Features

Conventional adaptive AECs have some inherent problems that make them expensive, difficult to use, and often produce insufficient echo reduction. Conventional AECs require large adaptive filters, in the order of few thousand coefficients, to provide acceptable echo reduction in reverberant acoustic environments, therefore, claiming a huge processing power and storage resources. The number of filter coefficients must be increased as the reverberation time of the application's acoustic environment increases, which on one hand decreases the convergence speed, and on the other hand makes it difficult to design a resource-efficient AEC for an application that will be used in different rooms. Failing to correctly choose the number of filter coefficients that matches the acoustic environment results in insufficient echo reduction, making the use of other helping components such as "residual echo reduction" and "non-linear processor" necessary, which in turn increases system complexity and cost.

CANEC solves the conventional AEC problems by employing a revolutionary fast adaptive filter designed to provide high echo reduction at a low processing load regardless of the application's acoustic environment. This next generation echo and noise canceller employs proprietary advanced signal processing algorithms that result in superior performance at much lower processing load than conventional systems. In a benchmark test, CANEC has been measured to provide 3 to 10 times faster speed compared to different conventional echo and noise cancellers on the same processor. CANEC, therefore, allows system designers to seamlessly and quickly add AEC and ANC functionality to their new or existing applications at minimum cost, leading to reduced product price, reduced development cycle, and fast time to market. In addition to supporting single channel systems, CANEC natively and efficiently supports multi-channel systems that employ several loudspeakers and several microphones. CANEC is available for several digital signal processors, general purpose processors, and embedded processors, and is easy to port to any fixed-point or floating-point platform due to its reduced complexity. The main features of CANEC (as per version 2.5) are summarized below.

• Complies fully with the G.167 standard.
• Employs an efficient unisize adaptive algorithm with 3 to 10 times less processing load than conventional echo cancellers.
• Provides superior and consistent single-talk echo reduction of 80 dB in any acoustic environments.
• Employs proprietary robust and effective double talk detector.
• Provides echo reduction of 30 dB or more during double-talk periods.
• Instant full convergence to 80 dB echo reduction in 100 milliseconds or less. Rate of adaptation is fast enough to allow excellent performance even with moving microphones and moving users.
• Low algorithm processing delay (defined by the user adjustable block length).
• Supports multiple loudspeakers and multiple microphones.
• Noise reduction algorithm providing up to 25 dB of background noise reduction with negligible speech distortion. Noise reduction level is user adjustable.
• Includes two automatic gain control units per channel for seamless control of speaker, and output signals' levels.
• Includes a sample synchronization module for clock skew correction; allowing cheaper codec hardware to be employed, and making the software usable on desktop and portable computing platforms.
• Works at any sampling frequency without any modification.
• Robust against moderate non-linearities in the acoustic response model and FES signals.
• Voids the need of helper software components such as "residual echo canceller" and "non-linear processor".
• Provides consistent performance at the same processing load in all acoustic environments, from a small car with a reverberation time of less than 100 ms to a large conference hall with reverberation time of 1.5 second or more.
• Suitable for any application that requires echo and/or noise cancellation including speaker-phones, hands-free car kits, audio and video conferencing, desktop conferencing, voice over IP, Internet phones, and many others.
• Works seamlessly after microphone arrays, automatic gain control, and mixer units, therefore saving huge processor cycles, memory, and power consumption, that would otherwise be wasted by placing a traditional AEC after each microphone as required by current technology.
• Trivial to integrate due to its simple Application Programming Interface.
• Fully configurable. System designers have complete control on system switches and algorithm parameters, including the ability to enable/disable and set the target level of individual channels in any functional block.
• Already available on several fixed-point and floating-point platforms including ARM, xscale, MIPS, SHx, x86, SHARC, BlackFin, and many others. CANEC also directly available for Microsoft Windows operating systems including Windows CE, Windows Mobile for Pocket PC, Windows Mobile for smartphones, Windows embedded, and of course Windows PC versions (95, 98, ME, 2000, 2003, XP). All Windows versions include an audio module that already integrates the CANEC API calls inside a data acquisition thread, making integration into a Windows application a matter of few lines of C++ code.
• Proven excellent performance in several applications ranging from professional audio, video conferencing, Desktop collaboration, Softphones, and consumer electronics products.

Evaluating CANEC

CANEC IP2IP Demo

• Windows PC (x86)
• Windows CE (x86, ARM, MIPS, and SH4 processors)
• Pocket PC devices (Windows Mobile 2003, 5.0, and 6.0).
• Smartphone devices (Windows Mobile 2003, 5.0, and 6.0).

• Establish a voice call between any two devices over a (wireless) network connection. All supported platforms use the same audio encoding, so you can call from a PC to a smart device or a Windows CE box, or from a PDA to a smartphone.
• Play an audio file to the loudspeaker, record the resulting echo, noise, and local speech, process the recorded data in real-time and saving the result to an audio file. This function is helpful when one person only is available for testing and it simulates one side of the hands-free communication scenario.
• Enable and disable any or all CANEC processing modules during the conversation to allow hearing the difference without stopping and starting again.
• Adjust all processing units target levels and other options such as selecting the loudspeaker type and the sample synchronization module type.
• Test audio streaming at 8 and 16 kHz sample rates.

To request the CANEC IP2IP demo, please fill in this short form.

Embedded Systems Evaluation Packages

CANEC is also available for evaluation on several DSP and embedded systems development boards. You will need to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement before you can evaluate CANEC on your development board. We recommend that you try the CANEC IP2IP demo before requesting an evaluation version on your embedded platform.