ClearOne announced today that it has been awarded a new patent relating to Beamforming and Acoustic Echo Cancellation by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

The USPTO issued patent number 9,866,952 to ClearOne. This patent, entitled “Conferencing Apparatus that Combines a Beamforming Microphone Array with an Acoustic Echo Canceller,” among other things, describes a method to first use a beamforming algorithm to generate several fixed beams, followed by performing acoustic echo cancellation on each beam, and then selecting one or more beams for transmission in response to a direction-of-arrival determination. For example, a beamforming microphone array mounted in a conference room ceiling may have beams that point in different directions. The echo cancelled audio from each of those fixed beams could be sent to a mixer, which uses input from a direction-of-arrival system to select the audio from one or more beams that point towards active local talkers in the room to be transmitted to a far end conference participant.

This new patent is part of ClearOne’s patent portfolio that currently includes over 100 patents and pending patent applications covering multiple new technologies in the fields of audio and video processing, audio and video streaming, and innovative communication technologies.  You can see all their patents here.