A Hybrid Approach to Combine Wireless and Earcup Microphones for ANC Headphones with Error Separation Module

Abstract

Active noise control (ANC) technology is commonly used to cancel acoustic noise in daily life. The conventional ANC headphone, being one of the mature commercial products that implement this approach, utilizes microphones on its earcup to pick up the reference signal. However, in a multi-noise source situation, the reference signal mixed with uncorrelated interference usually results in poor noise reduction performance of the ANC system. Hence, we proposed a novel hybrid approach that employs wireless microphones to acquire high signal-to-noise-ratio reference signals from far-end noise sources, increasing coherence and thus improving noise reduction performance. Additionally, an error separation model is applied in the proposed structure to enhance the coherence between the error signal and each adaptive filter. As a result, the proposed hybrid approach to combine wireless and earcup microphones for ANC headphone significantly improves its noise reduction performance when dealing with multi-noise sources. Furthermore, numerical simulation and real-time experiments of the proposed structure have shown that it improves noise reduction performance by 4 − 6 dB when compared to a conventional ANC headphone.