METHOD AND APPARATUS CAPABLE OF QUICKLY IDENTIFYING AN UNKNOWN SYSTEM EVEN ON OCCURRENCE OF A PLURALITY OF DISPERSIVE PORTIONS

In an identification apparatus for identifying an unknown system in response to a transmission input signal and an echo signal which includes multiple echoes sent through the unknown system, a plurality of adaptive filters each of which has a plurality of taps are supplied with the transmission signal in parallel to individually identify the multiple echoes by successively modifying tap coefficients in each adaptive filter. Information is transmitted from a j-th adaptive filter to a (j+1)-th adaptive filter to identify each of the multiple echoes. Each adaptive filter monitors modification times of tap coefficients or ERLE. Alternatively, a step size is changed from one to another to be delivered to tap coefficient generators and to accomplish high speed convergence.