Sequentially Adapted Parallel Feedforward Active Noise Control of Noisy Sinusoidal Signals

A large class of acoustic noise sources has an underlying periodic process that generates a periodic noise component, and thus their acoustic noise can in general be modeled as the sum of a periodic signal and a randomly fluctuating signal (usually a broadband background noise). Active control of periodic noise (i.e., for a mixture of sinusoids) is more effective than that of random noise. For mixtures of sinusoids in a background broadband random noise, conventional FXLMS-based single filter method does not reach the maximum achievable Noise Attenuation Level (NAL(max)). In this paper, an alternative approach is taken and the idea of a parallel active noise control (ANC) architecture for cancelling mixtures of periodic and random signals is presented. The proposed ANC system separates the noise into periodic and random components and generates corresponding antinoises via separate noise cancelling filters, and tends to reach NAL(max) consistently. The derivation of NAL(max) is presented. Both the separation and noise cancellation are based on adaptive filtering. Experimental results verify the analytical development by showing superior performance of the proposed method, over the single-filter approach, for several cases of sinusoids in white noise. Copyright (C) 2009 Govind Kannan et al.