Koninklijke Philips Corporation N.v.

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Bahaa Eddine Sarroukh

Cornelis Pieter Janse

Leon C A Van Stuivenberg

Alphons Antonius Maria Lambertus Bruekers

Harm Jan Willem Belt

Alphons A M L Bruekers

Thomas Andreas Maria Kevenaar

David Antoine Christian Marie Roovers

Wei Pien Lee

Luca Tiberi

Andre Melon Barroso

Mahdi Triki

Janneke Verhaegh

Thomas A M Kevenaar

The present invention relates to a lighting system () arranged to control a light intensity and a color temperature of light in a room (). The lighting system comprising: a light source () arranged to emit light, the light source () comprising a first and second light emitters () each being adjustable between a number of light intensity levels and arranged to emit light having a first and second color temperature, respectively. The light source () is arranged to provide an output signal (OS) comprising information pertaining to a light intensity level of said first and second light emitters (), respectively; a light sensor () arranged to measure the light intensity and the color temperature of the light in the room, and to provide a sense signal (SS) comprising information pertaining to the measured light intensity and color temperature; and a controller () arranged to control the color temperature and the light intensity of the light in the room () by adjusting the light intensity level of said first and second light emitters (), based on said sense signal (SS) provided by the light sensor () and said output signal (OS) provided by the light source ().

Lighting system and method for controlling a light intensity and a color temperature of light in a room

The invention relates to localizing the position of a person speaking by using pictures of a pattern () on an object () worn by the person. The object () carries a complex pattern () that is optimized for determining the orientation of the object (), the distance from the object to a microphone device () and/or to a camera (). Moreover, the pattern () may be arranged for identifying the person carrying the object (). The determination of the position of the person carrying the object () may be used to enhance speech recognition (SR) and/or to provide hands-free voice control of devices (DC), e.g. in hospitals or in industrial settings.

Localizing the position of a source of a voice signal

The invention proposes extracting one or more speech signals (-) as well as one or more ambient signals () from sound signals captured by microphones, wherein each of the speech signals corresponds to a different speaker. The invention proposes to transmit both the one or more speech signals (-) and the one or more ambient signals () to a rendering side, as opposed to sending only speech signals. This enables to reproduce the speech and ambient signals in a spatially different way at the rendering side. By reproducing the ambient signals a feeling of 'being together' is created. In an embodiment, the invention enables reproducing two or more speech signals spatially from each other and from the ambient signals so that speech intelligibility is increased despite the presence of the ambient signals.

Speech capturing and speech rendering

A sound source location is estimated by particle filtering where a set of particles represents a probability density function for a state variable comprising the sound source location. The method includes determining the weight for a particle in response to a correlation between estimated acoustic transfer functions from the sound source to at least two sound recording positions. A weight update function may specifically be determined deterministically from the correlation and thus the correlation may be used as a pseudo-likelihood function for the measurement function of the particle filtering. The acoustic transfer functions may be determined from an audio beamforming towards the sound source. The audio weight may be combined with a video weight to generate a multi-modal particle filtering approach.

Estimating a sound source location using particle filtering

A system () is described which is suited for suppressing audio distortion. The system comprises echo cancelling means (g, g) coupled between an audio output () and a distorted desired audio sensing microphone array (), and a filter arrangement () coupled to the echo cancelling means (g, g) and/or the microphone array (). The filter arrangement () includes filter coefficients representing at least a part of the audio distortion, such as reverberation. The system also comprises an at least partly mirrored circuit arrangement (g',&#x2032;) for copying thereby simulated audio distortion representative filter coefficient values into the filter coefficients of said filter arrangement (). Such copied values can be then used for suppressing reverberation in a distorted desired signal by the filter arrangement ().

Audio system providing for filter coefficient copying

Growing community of inventors

Eindhoven, Netherlands

Bahaa Eddine Sarroukh