Patent ID: 8275145

Claim:
A vehicle communication system comprising: a plurality of microphones configured to detect audio signals including speech signals of at least one vehicle passenger; a beamforming unit configured to receive the audio signals from the plurality of microphones and to generate a plurality of audio signal components corresponding to vehicle seat positions; a mixer combining the audio signal components to produce a resulting speech output signal; a seat occupancy detecting unit to detect the presence of non-occupied vehicle seats; a weighting unit configured to determine a weighting for each of the audio signal components, where the weighting unit sets the weighting of audio signal components of non-occupied seats to zero and where the weightings are applied when the audio signal components are combined to produce the resulting speech output signal; and an output loudspeaker beamforming unit, where the loudspeaker beamforming unit directs the output of loudspeakers only to occupied seat positions.