Directional cancellation of acoustic noise for home window applications

This paper focuses on an active noise cancellation system for a home window using a transparent acoustic transducer. In a traditional active noise cancellation system, direct microphone measurements are used for reference and error signals. In the case of the window application, both external and internal sound would be picked up by such microphones. This leads to adverse effects on the performance of the active noise cancellation system and also to distortion of the internal sound. To address this problem, a wave separation technique is proposed to separate the internal and external components of sound. The wave separation algorithm is based on the use of two microphones and an algorithm that separates components based on their direction of travel. An active noise cancellation system is implemented using wave separation for both the error and reference signal measurements. The performance of the resulting ANC system is experimentally tested in a cabin equipped with a window and results are presented. Experimental results show that the new system is able to accurately preserve desired internal sound while cancelling uncorrelated external noise. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.