A NEW TWO-SENSOR ACTIVE NOISE CANCELLATION ALGORITHM K.C. Zangi Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139 ABSTRACT In this paper we develop a new approach to active noise cancellation using two microphones. The primary mi ‘rophone is placed at the point where noise cancellation is desited and the secondary microphone is placed at some other point, The cancelling signal is generated fs the output of a two-input/single-output FIR filter ‘which is driven by the outputs of the secondary and the primary microphones. The output of the primary microphone ie not only used to adjust the coefficients ofthis filter, but is alzo used as an input to the filter iteelt. 1 INTRODUCTION ‘Unwanted acoustic noise sa by-product of many indus- trial processes and systems. In active noise cancellation (ANC), one introduces a secondary noise source to gen- ‘rate an acoustic field that interferes destructively with the unwanted noise, and thereby attenuates it (45,6) ‘Typically, measurements ofthe unwanted noise eld are made at one of more locations using single or multiple sensors, and the cancelling field is generated based on these measurements, These sensors are usualy divided into two groups: the primary sensor and the secondary sensors. The primary sensor is located at the point ‘where noise cancellation is desied, and the secondacy sensors are located at other points to provide informa- tion about the unwanted noise at the primary sensor. In meat existing ANC systems, the canceling signal is ‘derived only fom the outputs of the secondary sen- sors, In this paper, it is shown that the performance of the ANC system ean be significantly improved by generating the cancelling signal based on the outputs ‘This work was done the RLE Digital Signal Procesing Group, MIT. This work as been supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency mon- itored by ONR under Contract No. NOOO1489-1-1489, tnd US. Air Force Office of Sciemiic Research under Grant No, AFOSR-91-0034 11-351 of the secondary sensors and the primary sensor. Our approach is to construct the cancelling signal asa lin- ‘ear combination of the past values ofthe outputs ofthe primary and the secondary sensors, and we use a two- input/single-ontput LMS algorithm to find the linear ‘combination that results in maximum noise attenua- Tn this paper, the above two-tensor algorithm is de ‘veloped and its performance is compared to the LMS algorithm proposed in [6] and to the single-sensor al- gorithm proposed in [2]. Specifically, these three al- gorithms wete applied to noise recordings made using 2 set of headphones worn inside the cabin of a pro- pellet aircraft, The primary sensor was placed inside the headphones and the secondary sensor was attached to the outside of the headphones. Assuming that the transfer function between the cancelling speaker and the primary sensor wes a pure delay of about 40 seconds, the new algorithm was able to attenuate the overall noise power 15dB more than the LMS algorithm pro- ‘posed in (6) and 34B more than the single-sensor algo- rithm proposed in [2]. 2. EXISTING ANC ALGORITHMS A block diagram for a generie ANC system is de- picted in Fig, 1, In this figure, G(s) represents the transfer function from the input tothe cancelling speaker to the output of the primary sensor. ‘The signal nf) is the unwanted noise at the primary sensor; e(t) is the cancelling signal at the primary sensor; (1) = oft) + n(t) is the residual signal measured by the pri- ‘mary sensor; and s(t) is the output of the secondary sensor. ‘Throughout. this paper we will make the as- ‘sumption that there is no feedback from the cancelling, speaker tothe secondary microphone. This assumption is justified in the case of noise cancelling headphones with since the cancelling speaker is located inside the headphones and the secondary microphone is attached to the outside ofthe headphones. 61 and 62 ate binary. switches (equal to one or zero) that. determine what (0-7803-0946-4/93$3.00° 1993 IEEEsignals are used to generate the cancelling signal. We will assume in the reminder of this paper that G(2) is known and causal with g(0) = 0, where g(t) is the impulse response associated with Giz), The objective of the ANC system is to minimize £{c*(0)} (uere E{.} stands for the expected value). ‘Noise cancellation systems based on the LMS algo- rithms are curcently the most widely used two-sensor systems for ANC. In the two-sensor ANC algorithm presented in (6] the canceling signal is derived from. the output of the secondary sensor alone (this corre- sponds to 61 = 0 and 82 =1 in Fig. 1). In this system (0) is generated by applying an appropriate FIR filter to the output of the secondary sensor s(t). The out- put of the primary sensor, e(t, is only used to adjust the coefficients ofthis PIR filter based on an LMS algo- rithm. Note that after an initial adaptation period, the cocflcients ofthis FIR filter are no longer changing and c(t) is not used at all. Bssentially, this system cancels ‘that pact of the noise n(¢) which is correlated with the ‘output of the secondary sensor. The ANC system pro- ‘posed in {1] operates on the same principle except that it tries to account for the poatible feedback from the cancelling signal to the secondary sensor; hence, the block diagram for this system cotzesponds to setting 010 and 02=1 in Fig. 1 In the single sensor algorithm presented in [2], the cancelled noise at the primary sensor is measured and the output of this sensor alone is used to generate the cancelling signal (this corresponds to 61 = 1 and #2 =D in Fig. 1). ‘This algorithm is derived assuming that G(2) is & pure delay of f samples, With this assump- tion, the authors show that the cancelling signal that ‘minimizes the power of e(¢) is simply the negative of the k-step ahead predicted value of n(¢) 3. ADAPTIVE NOISE CANCELLATION ALGORITHM In this paper we present a new two-sensor ANC algorithm which uses the outputs of the primary and the secondary sensors to generate the canceling signal (ie bl = Land 02 = 1 in Fig. 1). Our approach is to construct the cancelling signal, c(t), ae a linear combination of the past values of n(t) and s(t). Specif: ically, the cancelling signal is generated as the output of a two-inpat/single-output FIR filter whose inputs are s(t) and n(t), and a stochastic gradient procedure is used to continuously adjust the coeficents of this filter so that £{e*) is minimized. Although n(t) is not dinectly measured, it ean be easily computed from the measurements of ¢(t) by simply subtracting the known canceling signal c(t) from e(2) [ANC system is depicted in Fig. 2. In this igure, W isa two-input/single-output FIR filter whose coefficients ere adjusted to minimize ‘the mean-squared power of the residual signal e(t), e(t) = n(0) +r(0) 90). a In Fig. 2, W is implemented as the sum of two parallel single-input/single-output FIR filters of length L, ie 10 =F whom + whOse-H), @) where wf (t) and wh(t) k= 0,...,L—Lare respectively the coefcients of the FIR filter wy and wnat time *t” Using (2) we can rewrite (1) as (t) = nt)+0n(tln(t)eo()}+ walt) al(e)29(0)- 8) Next, we define the vector of filter coeficents at time tas a) (w@),---. m2), 8), and two signals o)(0) and v(t) as rn) =n) +99) malt) = (+910). 6) ng these definitions, we can rewrite (3) as a O] () te tet eft) = n(0)4+ > wh(t)er(t-K)+F- wh(é)ealt—K) (6) ‘The following stochastic gradient procedure is used to continuously adjust (oo that E{e(0} is minimized ae +1) = a0) — ne, @ where jis the step-sze ofthe stochastic gradient algo- rithm, and Vei(t) isthe gradient of e2(t) with respect to 0 evaluated at 2 — 9), “The gradient in (7) can be easily calculated from the measured signals a(t) and s(¢) [6]. Noting that Vel(t) = 2(t)Ve(t), we see that this calculation re duces to determining Ve(t). From (6), we then get Vell) = foilt)--ml@-L4), (8) ta(es-otalt = E+ 1)) = Kt. @ ul E41), 22l0)—-ptat— E+]. eis important to note that at time “t°, V(t) ‘an be computed according to (5) from the known sig- nals (2) and n(t) andthe Known impulse response 9). 11-382In summary, the update equation for the filter eo- ficients that minimize E(6*(0)} is (4 +1) = Blt) ~ 2ne(NULO, (19) where Yi) = [rl va(E- 9, GD) valle val — 1 ml) = nit) +9(t) (12) w(t) = (0) ft) (a3) 4. SIMULATION RESULTS The performance of the two-sensor algorithm of (10) (13) was compared to that of the LMS algorithm pre- sented in [6] and the single-sensor algorithm presented in 2], Specifically, the thre algorithms were applied to noise recordings made using a set of headphones worn inside the cabin of a propeller aircraft. ‘The primary sensor was placed inside the headphones and the sec- ‘ondary sensor was attached to the outside of the head- phones, In all the simulations, G(+) (the transfer func- tion from the cancelling speaker to the primary sensor) was assumed to be a pure delay of one or more sam- ples. The results of applying these three algorithms to the recorded data are shown in figure 3. The x-axis in this figure indicates the delay between the cancelling speaker and the primary sensor. ‘Asis clea from these results, the new two-sensor al~ {gorithm significantly outperforms the LMS algorithm, Tes also interesting to note that if the delay between the cancelling speaker and the primary microphone is small, the performance improvement from use of the towo-sensor algorithm over the single-seasor algorithm in [2] is relatively small. In a typical noise cancelling Iheadphone application, the distance between the can- celling speaker and the primary microphone is on the order of 1 or 2 centimeters, corresponding to delay of bout 40-80 seconds, which might well not justify the incorporation of the secondary sensor. In other appli cations with longer delays, the importance of the sec- ondary sensor increases, ‘The results in figure 3 imply that for short delays the secondary sensor does not provide significant ad- ditional information, beyond that provided by the pr ‘mary sensor, about the future values of the noise at the primary sensor. ‘The comparison in figure 3 be- ‘yween the single sensor algorithm and the LMS algo- rithim suggests that the future values of the noise at the primary sensor are more correlated with their past values than with the past values of the output of the secondary sensor. It is important to remember that these results are only valid for the special case of noise cancelling head: ‘Phones with the primary sensor located inside the head ‘Phones and the secondary sensor attached to the out side of the headphones. For example in a duct appli- ‘ction with the secondary sensor located close to the source of the noise, one would expect that the output of the secondary sensor would contain significant ad ditional information beyond that provided by the pri- ‘mary sensor. However, in many applications, such as the noise cancelling headphones, itis not practical to place the secondary sensor near the source of noise, REFERENCES [i] LJ. Briksson, M.C. Allie, and C.D. Bremigan, “Active Noise Control Using Adaptive Digital Si nal Proceasing,” Proc. ICASSP, New York, 1988, pp. 2594-2507. a A. Oppenheim, B. Weinstein, K, Zang, ete, “Sin {le Sensor Aciive Noise Cancellation’ Based on the EM algorithm,” Proc. ICASSP, San Francisco, 1992, vol. I, pp. 277-280. [9] E. Weinstein, A. Oppenheim, M. Peder, “Signal Enhancement Using Single and Multi-Sensor Mea- surements” MIT-RLE Technical Report No. 560, December 1990. [i] GE. Warnaka, I, Poole, and J. Tichy, “Active At tenvator," US Patent Number 4,473,906 Septem ber 25, 1984 [6] GB. Chaplin, “Method and Apparatus for can- calling Vibration,” U.S. Patent Number 4,489,441 December 18, 1984, {6] A. Burguess, “Active Sound Control: Adaptive,” IBEE Trans. Signal Processing, Dec. 18, 1981 11-353a) ow wo Cancellation [*—LbL-— Algorithm Ko [2 }+—$s) Figure I: Generic ANC system, x te Ge) t a n(t) / I ATE “ Cc lg Figure 2: ‘The new two-sensor ANC system, Po Prin Tine eo) Figure 3: Attenuation obtained using three different ANC algorithms. 11-354