Integrated psychoacoustic active noise control and masking

Abstract

The active noise control (ANC) algorithms are widely applied in noise-canceling headphones. However, the disadvantage of conventional ANC algorithms is the high computational cost from high order finite-impulse-response filter, which also leads to slower convergence. Subband ANC algorithms, which are based on the subband adaptive filter, are used to reduce computational complexity and to increase convergence rate. Moreover, noise cancellation performance decreases at the higher frequency due to the decreasing control zone. In headphones based application, perceptual quality of noise attenuation and target audio signal are important factors, and ANC algorithm must be designed to account for the psychoacoustic parameters. In this paper, we propose a new noise reduction approach in order to solve some existing ANC headphones problems, especially high-frequency noise reduction and perceptual quality of the playback sound. The proposed algorithm is a new approach of integrated psychoacoustic subband ANC and psychoacoustic masking. Psychoacoustic subband ANC achieves lesser computational cost than conventional subband ANC by using the psychoacoustic model to attenuate only audible noise components during music playback in the headphones. Proposed new integrated system is efficient for broadband noise attenuation. Psychoacoustic ANC reduces noise in the most sensitive frequency range for human’s hearing system, 0–4000 Hz, and masking operates in order to mask out residual and high-frequency noise. In additional, proposed noise reduction system reduces only audible noise components. The integrated ANC-masking system applied psychoacoustic analysis without producing artificial distortions to the music signal. Objective and subjective perceptual tests are evaluated for the proposed ANC-masking system with other subband ANC and masking algorithms. Results show the advantage of the proposed integrated system in the terms of the perceptual sound quality and high-frequency noise reduction.