Spatial Active Noise Control in Rooms Using Higher Order Sources

All spatial active noise control (ANC) systems, when deployed in typical room environments, have time-varying acoustic channels between the secondary sources and the error microphones. The conventional online secondary path modeling techniques, which introduce additive auxiliary random noise to estimate the secondary paths, become challenging especially in a multichannel setup. In this work, we propose to use higher-order variable-directivity sound sources as secondary sources for spatial ANC, in which both the interior residual noise field within the control region and exterior sound field due to secondary source radiation are jointly controlled. The aim of controlling the exterior sound field is to minimize room reverberation generated by the secondary sources so that the secondary paths in the proposed algorithm can be approximated as free-field propagation and thus can be pre-calibrated. The system is implemented in an adaptive manner to track noise variations. The results show that the proposed method can effectively cancel spatial noise field and control exterior sound field at an acceptable low level in time-varying room environments.