Dual Active Noise Control with Common Sensors

In public spaces, it is important to reduce ambient noise and surrounding conversation sounds for smooth conversations. Since partitions are often installed at bank counters and shared offices to separate the space from the surrounding area, active noise control can be applied to these partitions. In this paper, we propose a dual active noise control (ANC) that can reduce unwanted sound simultaneously in two spaces separated by the partition while using common sensors. In the proposed dual ANC, one sensor acts as a reference sensor in one system and as an error sensor in the other system. We theoretically clarify signal processing mechanisms to realize simultaneous noise reduction. Simulation results indicate that the proposed dual ANC can achieve more than 6 dB noise reduction simultaneously in the two spaces and the film-like speaker is more suitable for secondary sources to improve the noise reduction performance.