Correlation and spatial sensitivity of eigenfilters for selective signal cancellation in multiple-listener environments

Selectively cancelling signals at specific locations within an acoustical environment with multiple listeners is of significant importance for home theater, automobile, teleconferencing, office, industrial and other applications. We propose the eigenfilter for selectively cancelling signals in one direction, while attempting to retain them at unintentional directions. In this paper we investigate the behaviour of the performance measure (i.e., the gain) for a vowel and an unvoiced fricative, when the listener moves his head, in an automobile type environment. We show that in such a situation, a large energy in the difference between the impulse responses at a listener's location may affect the gain substantially. Preliminary results also show that the gain is not significantly affected by the variations in the type of the speech signal.