VEHICLE COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

• US 20070280486A1
• Filed: 04/25/2007
• Published: 12/06/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 04/25/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Harman Becker Automotive Systems GmbH (Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.)
• Original Assignee: Harman Becker Automotive Systems GmbH (Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.)
• Inventors: Haulick, Tim, Buck, Markus, Schmidt, Gerhard
• Granted Patent: US 8,275,145 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 381/92
• CPC Class Codes: H04R 2499/13 Acoustic transducers and sound field adaptation in vehicles
• CPC Class Codes: H04R 27/00 Public address systems circuits for preventing acoustic reaction H04R3/02; circuits for distributing signals to loudspeakers H04R3/12; monitoring or testing arrangements for public address systems H04R29/007; amplifiers H03F
• CPC Class Codes: H04S 7/301 Automatic calibration of stereophonic sound system, e.g. with test microphone
• CPC Class Codes: H04S 7/303 Tracking of listener position or orientation

Abstract

The present invention relates to a vehicle communication system comprising a plurality of microphones adapted to detect speech signals of different vehicle passengers, a mixer combining the audio signal components of the different microphones to a resulting speech output signal, a weighting unit determining the weighting of the audio signal components for the resulting speech output signal, where the weighting unit determines the weighting of the signal components based upon non-acoustical information about the presence of a vehicle passenger.

Claims

1. A vehicle communication system comprising:

a plurality of microphones adapted to detect speech signals of different vehicle passengers, each microphone producing an audio signal component;

a mixer combining the audio signal components of the different microphones to produce a resulting speech output signal; and

a weighting unit determining the weighting of the audio signal components for the resulting speech output signal, where the weighting unit determines the weighting of the signal components based upon non-acoustical information about the presence of a vehicle passenger.

2. The vehicle communication system of claim 1, further including a vehicle seat pressure sensor, where the weighting unit determines the weighting of the audio signal components based upon signals from the pressure sensor.

3. The vehicle communication system of claim 1, further including an image sensor, where the weighting unit determines the weighting of the audio signal components based upon signals from the image sensor.

4. The vehicle communication system of claim 1, further including a plurality of loudspeakers for outputting audio signals, where the use of the different loudspeakers depends upon the information about the presence of a vehicle passenger.

5. The vehicle communication system of claim 1, where an image sensor detects the speech activity of a vehicle passenger.

6. The vehicle communication system of claim 1, further including a beamforming unit that generates a vehicle-seat speech signal that combines the signals detected from the plurality of microphones picking up speech signals from one or more passengers sitting on vehicle seats.

7. The vehicle communication system of claim 1, where if the presence of a passenger at a predetermined vehicle seat position cannot be detected, the weighting unit sets the weighting of the signal components of the vehicle seat position to zero.

8. A vehicle communication system comprising:

a plurality of microphones adapted to detect speech signals of different vehicle passengers, each microphone producing an audio signal component;

a mixer combining the audio signal components of the different microphones to produce a resulting speech output signal;

a seat occupancy detecting unit detecting the presence of non-occupied vehicle seats; and

a weighting unit determining the weighting of the audio signal components for the resulting speech output signal, where the weighting unit sets the weighting of audio signal components of non-occupied seats to zero.

9. A method for controlling a speech output of a vehicle communication system, the method comprising:

detecting speech signals of at least one vehicle passenger using a plurality of microphones, each microphone producing a speech signal component;

weighting the speech signal components detected by the different microphones; and

combining the weighted speech signal components to a resulting speech output signal, where the weighting of the different speech signal components is based upon non-acoustical information about the presence of vehicle passengers.

10. The method of claim 9, further including determining the speech signal components for the different vehicle seat passenger positions, where the weighting of the speech signal components is determined for the different vehicle seat positions.

11. The method of claim 10, where the weighting for the signal components for a predetermined vehicle seat position is set to zero when it is detected that there is no passenger in the vehicle seat position.

12. The method of claim 9, where the resulting speech signal is used for the voice controlled operation of a vehicle component.

13. The method of claim 9, where the resulting speech signal is used for a conference call with an external subscriber and at least two vehicle passengers.

14. The method of claim 9, where the resulting speech signal is used for communication of different vehicle passengers with each other.

15. The method of claim 9, further including adding the different weighted signal components detected by the microphone to the resulting speech output signal.

16. The method of claim 9, further including controlling the output of an audio signal with a plurality of loudspeakers depending upon the non-acoustical information about the presence of a vehicle passenger for a predetermined vehicle position.

17. The method of claim 16, where the output of the audio signal produced by the loudspeakers is optimized for a vehicle seat position, for which it has been determined that a passenger is present.

18. The method of claim 9, where the signal of a seat pressure sensor is used for detecting the presence of a passenger.

19. The method of claim 9, where the signal of an image sensor is used for detecting the presence of a passenger

20. The method of claim 9, where detecting the speech signal of a vehicle passenger is based upon the signal from an image sensor.

21. A method of controlling a speech output of a vehicle communication system, the method comprising:

detecting speech signals of at least one vehicle passenger using a plurality of microphones, each microphone producing a speech signal component;

weighting the speech signal components detected by the different microphones;

combining the weighted speech signal components to produce a resulting speech output signal; and

detecting the presence of non-occupied seats, where the weighting of signal components of non-occupied seats is set to zero.