Instrumental Evaluation of In-Car Communication Systems

The aim of an in-car communication system is to improve the communication inside a vehicle. This communication is impaired, due to the high background noise occurring at higher velocities and can be improved by recording, processing, and playing back the speech signal of the talking passenger using loudspeakers. Due to this closed electroacoustic loop further issues arise, requiring more sophisticated algorithms, e.g., feedback control. After the development of an ICC system, the quality of the system is of great interest. Not only to analyze and to improve a single ICC system an evaluation is beneficial, but also to compare different ones. However, the term communication quality is not easy to fit into one instrumental measure, since quality depends on a variety of criteria. This contribution gives some first instrumental measures classifying the quality of an ICC system and a first approach to combine these to obtain an overall evaluation strategy.