Design and implementation of an active noise control headphone with directional hear-through capability
Design and implementation of an active noise control headphone with directional hear-through capability
This article presents the design and implementation of an active noise control (ANC) headphone system with a directional hear-through capability and compares the performance of this system to that of a standard hear-through headphone system. The directional hear-through ANC headphones are a novel integration of microphone array beamforming and ANC technologies into a pair of headphones, which provide the consumer with additional functionality and new, digitally augmented ways to interact with their acoustic environment. As the microphone array is necessarily compact, superdirective beamforming is utilised to increase its low and mid frequency directional performance. In this unique integration of two current consumer technologies, first, the ANC subsystem attempts to maximise the attenuation and then the beamformer output is added to the control signal and reproduced by the headphones' loudspeakers, with the appropriate compensation to avoid self-cancellation. The experimental study demonstrates that the proposed spatially selective ANC headphones provide a hear-through capability in the look direction, whilst reducing ambient noise and enabling the wearer to experience reduced noise communication in a noisy environment. The proposed system thus offers the consumer the potential for an electronically enhanced acoustic experience, allowing a selective reduction in environmental noise whilst desired exterior noise remains audible.
Active noise control, adaptive control, augmented reality, feedforward systems, hardware, microphone array, superdirective beamformer
32-40
Patel, Vinal
2d968af6-bba7-4f52-94a3-d849451b9fb3
Cheer, Jordan
8e452f50-4c7d-4d4e-913a-34015e99b9dc
Fontana, Simone
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1 February 2020
Patel, Vinal
2d968af6-bba7-4f52-94a3-d849451b9fb3
Cheer, Jordan
8e452f50-4c7d-4d4e-913a-34015e99b9dc
Fontana, Simone
c194e2f4-0677-4189-bb7b-f0b171a89f6a
Patel, Vinal, Cheer, Jordan and Fontana, Simone
(2020)
Design and implementation of an active noise control headphone with directional hear-through capability.
IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 66 (1), , [8917683].
(doi:10.1109/TCE.2019.2956634).
Abstract
This article presents the design and implementation of an active noise control (ANC) headphone system with a directional hear-through capability and compares the performance of this system to that of a standard hear-through headphone system. The directional hear-through ANC headphones are a novel integration of microphone array beamforming and ANC technologies into a pair of headphones, which provide the consumer with additional functionality and new, digitally augmented ways to interact with their acoustic environment. As the microphone array is necessarily compact, superdirective beamforming is utilised to increase its low and mid frequency directional performance. In this unique integration of two current consumer technologies, first, the ANC subsystem attempts to maximise the attenuation and then the beamformer output is added to the control signal and reproduced by the headphones' loudspeakers, with the appropriate compensation to avoid self-cancellation. The experimental study demonstrates that the proposed spatially selective ANC headphones provide a hear-through capability in the look direction, whilst reducing ambient noise and enabling the wearer to experience reduced noise communication in a noisy environment. The proposed system thus offers the consumer the potential for an electronically enhanced acoustic experience, allowing a selective reduction in environmental noise whilst desired exterior noise remains audible.
Text
IEEE TCE Spatially Selective ANC
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 30 October 2019
e-pub ahead of print date: 28 November 2019
Published date: 1 February 2020
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
Manuscript received August 2, 2019; revised October 14, 2019; accepted October 30, 2019. Date of publication November 28, 2019; date of current version January 24, 2020. This work was supported by Huawei through the Huawei Innovation Research Program (HIRP). (Corresponding author: Vinal Patel.) V. Patel was with the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, U.K. He is now with the Department of Information Technology, ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Gwalior, Gwalior 474015, India (e-mail: vp@iiitm.ac.in).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1975-2011 IEEE.
Keywords:
Active noise control, adaptive control, augmented reality, feedforward systems, hardware, microphone array, superdirective beamformer
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 435476
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/435476
ISSN: 0098-3063
PURE UUID: 3baf4ced-57aa-4b76-81f5-67690f480602
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Date deposited: 07 Nov 2019 17:30
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:22
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Author:
Vinal Patel
Author:
Simone Fontana
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