Active Noise Control System Using Delayless Subband

Architecture
Shubam Mittal 13D070029 , Nikhil Cherian Kurian 164070020
Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay

April 2, 2017

Abstract
Active Noise Control (ANC) systems are used to generate anti noise to nullify low frequency
noises in various applications. The conventional ANCs suffer from low convergence and hence
residual noise is not cancelled properly when the reference signal is having a large dynamic
range. Further the computational complexity in implementing such system is also high. As a
remedy to such problem subband adaptive algorithm involving a delayless subband architecture
were introduced which gives much improved results over the conventional adaptive systems.

1 Introduction
Some of the most popular applications in signal processing like echo cancellation and noise sup-
pression are designed using adaptive filters implemented with the help of some real-time gradient
decent algorithms[1]. In the past decade the application of active noise control system through
adaptive system gained widespread popularity and attention.[2][3] In particular wideband active
noise control systems implemented as FIR structures were one of the most researched topics [4][5].
However conventional approaches in implementing the system directly through adaptive algorithms
seem to have many issues associated with it. The computational burden imposed by these system
in terms of the number of filtering taps for a conventional adaptive required precludes their use for
many low cost applications[6]. Further when the target noise was having high correlation the pop-
ular gradient descent algorithm for wideband active noise control system, FxLMS exhibited poor
performance in terms of convergence time.[7] LMS based algorithms like leaky LMS to counter
the problem of poor convergence was inappropriate for applications like wideband active noise
control system, since the improvement in convergence performance compromised on the residual
error adding to further inefficiency in the system. One feasible solution reported in literature is to
exploit the application of subband architecture in wideband ANC. However conventional subband
architecture involving both analysis and synthesis filter bank produced additional delay challeng-
ing the causality of the system implemented in real time. Hence a delayless subband architectures
were proposed in literature[6][8] and was found to be effective in bringing down the computational
complexity as well as to reduce the convergence time with the least delays.

2 Active Noise Control System

Active noise control (ANC), which is based on the principle of destructive superposition, has
emerged as an effective solution for noise control in the low frequency region of the spectrum.[1]
A basic feed-forward ANC system consists of a reference microphone which senses the noise to
be canceled, a loudspeaker which produces the necessary anti-noise, an adaptive controller which
drives the loudspeaker and an error microphone which measures the level of noise mitigation
achieved. The adaptive controller is usually an adaptive finite impulse response (FIR) filter, the
weights of which are updated using a suitable adaptive algorithm.
In active noise control systems due to the proximity of error microphone that samples the
residual noise and active loudspeaker that drives the acoustic anti noise a secondary path is created
in addition to the primary acoustic path. Hence the update algorithm requires an additional
modeling of this secondary path and therefore the update of the adaptive filter requires a filtered

1
 d(n)
x(n) P(z)
+

-

y(n) y s (n)
W(z) S(z)

x (n) e(n)
S(z) Weight Update

Figure 1: Basic block diagram of an active noise control system

input from this modeled secondary path. The most common adaptive algorithm employed in a
feed-forward ANC system with an adaptive FIR filter as the controller is therefore a modified


version LMS algorithm known as the filtered-x least mean square (FxLMS) algorithm[9].
The basic block diagram of an ANC system is shown in figure 1, where x(n) is the primary
noise measured by the reference microphone, y(n) is the output of the adaptive controller, d(n) is
the primary noise as observed at the error microphone, P (z) is the transfer function of the primary
path, S(z) is the transfer function of the secondary path, S(z)
b is the transfer function of the model
of the secondary path, W (z) is the transfer function of the adaptive controller, x0 (n) is x(n) filtered
through a model of the secondary path and ys (n) is the secondary path output can be given as
y(n)s(n) and operator * denotes convolution. The error signal, as sensed by the error microphone
is given by e(n) = d(n) y(n) s(n), where s(n) is the impulse response of the secondary path.

3 Subband Adaptive Filtering

Filter banks helps in decomposing an input signal to multiple subbands that covers contiguous
portion of frequency spectrum. Through subband adaptive filters the input signal is partitioned
into many such parallel channels. By doing so, more conducive properties of subband architecture
could be exploited to implement efficient adaptive signal processing algorithms . Additionally by
processing in subbands the computational complexity can be brought down due to the decimated
processing of samples in subband along with the fact that the effective required number of filter
taps gets reduced in subband.[6]

3.1 Delayless Subband Architectures

In conventional subband structures used for adaptive filtering requires the full-band error signal
that needs to be regenerated using synthesis filter bank. However for time critical applications like
ANC the use of both analysis and synthesis filter bank introduces undesirable delay in the signal
path.[10] Hence proper cancellation in real time will be difficult in such circumstances. In order to
rectify this problem delayless subband architectures were introduced in the literature.[6] In such
structures the need for reconstructing full band error signal was completely eliminated and thus
the need of synthesis filter bank was eliminated. The analysis filter bank employed DFT filter bank
that could decompose the input signal into N subbands of bandwidth 2/N as well as could give
DFT coefficents of input. Using this as an advantage the error computed in various subbands were
processed by collecting coefficients in each subband that fell on the passband of analysis filter and
stacking together them to reproduce the effective overall fullband weight vectors.
The block diagram of a closed loop subband architecture used in wideband ANC is shown in
figure 2.The fullband input signal u(n) and desired response d(n) are decomposed into N spectral
bands using analysis filters Hi (z) for i = 0, 1, ..., N 1.. These subband signals are decimated to
a lower rate using the same factor D and are processed by individual adaptive subfilters Wi (z).
By a weight stacking mechanism they are further processed to give the fullband effectinve weight

2
 Figure 2: Block diagram of closed loop subband architecture used in wideband ANC [10]

vectors W .

4 Implementation of Wideband ANC Using Delayless Sub-

band Sructure
The schematic diagram of the wideband active noise control system implemented using delayless
subband architecture is shown in the figure 3.

Figure 3: Schematic diagram of delayless subband ANC

3
4.1 Simulation Experiment
A set of two distinct experiments were conducted to test the efficiency of the system under corre-
lated noise. The first set of experiment used highly correlated test noise created by passing a white
1
noise through a correlating IIR filter 10.9z 1 .In the second set of experiment a less correlated real

noise of an engine used was used.

In these simulations, a total of 32 subbands were implemented using the DFT filter bank. The
decimation factor used was D = 16 (Non-critically decimated). A subband version of FxLMS
was used as the adaptive algorithm. The learning rate used was = 0.2 empirically observed for
maximum performance. The impulse response of the primary and secondary acoustic paths used
in ANC (figure 4) were taken from the experimental database given in [10].
The performance of the systems in terms of the convergence performance was observed and
recorded.

Figure 4: Frequency and phase response of primary and secondary path used in ANC

4
5 Results
The results observed in the two simulation experiment were analyzed in terms of the convergence
of mean square error (calculated by conducting 100 independent trials) against iterations.

5
Subband FxLMS
FxLMS
0

-5
MSE (dB)

-10

-15

-20

-25
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000
iterations

Figure 5: Result from simulation experiment 1: Mean square error vs iteration of highly correlated
test noise

Figure 6: Result from simulation experiment 2: Mean square error vs iteration of a real engine
noise

6 Observation and Conclusion

For the two simulation experiment conducted it is clearly observed that the convergence given by
subband adaptive filters are superior especially when the correlation of the noise is higher. In the
case of real engine noise when when the correlation is not very high the convergence still tends to
better than the conventional adaptive filter structure. This is because the subband signals have
a flatter spectrum (i.e. a smaller spectral dynamic range), resulting in faster convergence for the

5
gradient-based adaptive algorithms. Further this structure eliminates the signal-path delay caused
by the combined analysis and synthesis filter banks by to a delayless architecture. Finally the
computational savings is also obtained by using such adaptive subfilters with shorter length that
operate at a lower decimated rate.
Hence the implemented delayless subband architecture proves to be the best structure for the
wideband active noise control systems dealing with correlated noise.

Acknowledgement
We like to thank Prof.Vikram Gadre and the teaching assosciates of EE678 course in giving us an
opportunity to implement this project and exhibit in front of a wide audience.

References
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