Active noise control upon speech at driver’s seat with a headrest speaker

Abstract

Passengers sitting in the back seats of cars while talking on their mobiles can easily experience the invasion of their speech privacy by the driver. Protecting speech privacy can be done by utilizing masking sounds - masking sound may be so loud that it annoys both drivers and speakers. In the previous research, the feasibility of utilizing active noise control (ANC), which aims to reduce the level of speech targeted toward the driver, thus lowering the needed level of masking sounds while still protecting speech privacy was proceeded. And, it was shown that the active noise control by itself with the given system was not enough to lower the speech intelligibility and the needed masking sound level significantly. Hence, throughout this research, active noise control upon speech at driver’s seat using headrest speaker from Infiniti G37 is performed and showed better performance than what we observed from the previous research.