A Realistic Multiple Circular Array System for Active Noise Control over 3D Space

Spatial active noise control (ANC) systems focus on minimizing unwanted acoustic noise over a continuous spatial region. Conventionally, spatial ANC systems are proposed using point based multi-channel systems and recently novel methods have been developed using spherical harmonic analysis of spatial sound fields. A major limitation for implementing the latter approach is the requirement of regularly distributed microphones and loudspeakers over spherical surfaces. In this paper, we relax the above constraint by constructing a system utilizing multiple circular microphone and loudspeaker arrays and designing a corresponding ANC algorithm. By simulation, we show that the proposed method can achieve comparable ANC performance to conventional spherical array methods. By experiment, we demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the multiple circular array structure and verify its effectiveness given practical constraints.