Patent ID: 7117145

Claim:
A cabin communication system for improving clarity of a voice spoken within an interior cabin having ambient noise, said cabin communication system comprising: a microphone for receiving the spoken voice and the ambient noise and for converting the spoken voice and the ambient noise into an audio signal, the audio signal having a first component corresponding to the spoken voice and a second component corresponding to the ambient noise; a speech enhancement filter for removing the second component from the audio signal to provide a filtered audio signal; and a loudspeaker for outputting a clarified voice in response to the filtered audio signal, wherein said speech enhancement filter comprises: a first filter element that smooths a spectrum of the audio signal over larger windows at higher frequencies in accordance with a mel-scale to provide a smoothed audio signal; a second filter element that filters the smoothed audio signal with a causal Wiener filter to provide a Wiener filter result; and a third filter element that performs at one of temporal and frequency smoothing of the Wiener filter result to provide the filtered audio signal.