Speech Reinforcement System for Car Cabin Communications

A speech reinforcement system is presented to improve communication between the front and the rear passengers in large motor vehicles. This type of communication can be difficult due to a number of factors, including distance between speakers, noise and lack of visual contact. The system described makes use of a set of microphones to pick up the speech of each passenger, then it amplifies these signals and plays them back to the cabin through the car audio loudspeaker system. The two main problems are noise amplification and electro-acoustic coupling between loudspeakers and microphones. To overcome these problems the system uses a set of acoustic echo cancellers, echo suppression filters and noise reduction stages. In this paper, the stability of a speech reinforcement system is studied. We propose a solution based on echo cancellers and residual echo suppression filters. The spectral estimation method for the power spectral density of the residual echo existing after the echo canceller is presented along with the derivation of the optimal residual echo suppression filter. Some results about the performance of the proposed system are also provided.