Deep Learning for Individual Listening Zone

A recent trend in car audio systems is the generation of Individual Listening Zones (ILZ), allowing to improve phone call privacy and reduce disturbance to other passengers, without wearing headphones or earpieces. This is generally achieved by using loudspeaker arrays. In this paper, we describe an approach to achieve ILZ exploiting general purpose car loudspeakers and processing the signal through carefully designed Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters. We propose a deep neural network approach for the design of filters coefficients in order to obtain a so-called bright zone, where the signal is clearly heard, and a dark zone, where the signal is attenuated. Additionally, the frequency response in the bright zone is constrained to be as flat as possible. Numerical experiments were performed taking the impulse responses measured with either one binaural pair or three binaural pairs for each passenger. The results in terms of attenuation and flatness prove the viability of the approach.