Improving Performance of Hybrid Active Noise Control Systems for Uncorrelated Narrowband Disturbances

In filtered-x LMS (FxLMS) single-channel feedforward active noise control (ANC) systems, a reference signal is available that is correlated with the primary disturbance at the error microphone. In some practical situations, there may also be a disturbance uncorrelated with the primary disturbance at the error microphone, for which a correlated reference signal is not available. This disturbance, being uncorrelated with the primary noise, cannot be controlled by the standard FxLMS algorithm, and increases the residual noise. In this paper we propose an improved hybrid ANC system that can simultaneously control both the correlated and uncorrelated noise signals. The proposed method comprises three adaptive filters: 1) the FxLMS-based ANC filter to cancel the primary noise; 2) a separate FxLMS-based ANC filter to cancel the uncorrelated disturbance; and 3) an LMS-based supporting adaptive filter to generate appropriate signals for the two ANC filters. Computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively mitigate the correlated and uncorrelated primary disturbances. This improved performance is achieved at only a small increase in computational complexity.