Evaluation of spatial active noise cancellation performance using spherical harmonic analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a novel metric to evaluate the performance of spatial active noise cancellation (ANC) systems. We show that the acoustic potential energy within a spherical region can be expressed by a weighed squared sum of spherical harmonic coefficients. The proposed metric allows convenient evaluation of spatial ANC performance using a spherical microphone array. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this metric, we set up a experimental ANC system and conducted a series narrow band and wide band ANC experiments, the results show that the proposed potential energy method provides a reliable characterization of the performance of spatial ANC systems. Show more