Singular vector filtering method for mitigation of disturbance enhancement in multichannel active noise control systems

In the design of multichannel active noise control filters, the disturbance enhancement phenomenon will sometimes occur, i.e., the resulting sound is enhanced instead of being reduced in some frequency bands, if the control filter is designed to minimize the power of error signals in other frequency bands or across all frequencies. In previous work, a truncated singular value decomposition method was applied to the system autocorrelation matrix to mitigate the disturbance enhancement. Some small singular values and the associated singular vectors are removed, if they are responsible for unwanted disturbance enhancement in some frequency bands. However, some of these removed singular vectors may still contribute to the noise control performance in other frequency bands; thus, a direct truncation will degrade the noise control performance. In the present work, through an additional filtering process, the set of singular vectors that causes the disturbance enhancement is replaced by a set of new singular vectors whose frequency responses are attenuated in the frequency band where disturbance enhancement occurs, while the frequency responses in other frequency bands are unchanged. Compared with truncation approach, the proposed method can maintain the performance in the noise reduction bands, while mitigating the influence in disturbance enhancement bands.