A Method of Designing Low-power Feedback Active Noise Control Filter for Headphones/Earphones

This paper presented a method of designing low-power feedback active noise control filter optimized for headphones/earphones. Using constrained optimization, we obtained a high order FIR noise control filter to ensure reasonable noise attenuation performance at high sampling frequency environment. Then using infinite impulse response (IIR) approximation method called Balanced Model Truncation (BMT), we obtained a low order IIR noise control filter suitable for low-power digital signal processing system like headphones/earphones. For further performance improvement, we utilized frequency warping method so that we could obtain more accurately approximated IIR filter and we ensured system stability by reconstructing the low order IIR filter in form of cascaded second order IIR filters. ANC simulation with white noise and stability test verified that the proposed algorithm had superior attenuation performance and better robustness compared to the conventional algorithm.