Robustness of the Eigenfilter for Variations in Listener Responses for Selective Signal Cancellation

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 have proposed 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.