Improving Adaptive Filters for Active Noise Control Using Particle Swarm Optimization

The excessive exposure to certain kinds of acoustic noise can lead to health problems. To avoid this situation, the use of noise attenuation devices is a standard solution. Among those devices, the active noise control (ANC) systems have gained prominence over the years, mainly due to the technological development and costs reduction of electronic components. Despite good performance of ANC concerning low-frequency noise attenuation, the convergence speed for this kind of system is still an important issue when it deals with real-time applications in dynamic environments. This article presents an alternative solution to accelerate the active attenuation system response. This solution is based on the use of sets of coefficients, which are employed during the adaptive filter initialization and are obtained via a training process with particle swarm optimization (PSO). Two objective functions were tested: one based on the response time itself and the other one based on the magnitude reduction of the residual noise. The coefficients obtained through this process provided response time reductions up to 98.3% concerning adaptive filters initialized with null coefficients. The article is an extended version of the conference paper Accelerating the Convergence of Adaptive Filters for Active Noise Control Using Particle Swarm Optimization, published in LA-CCI 2017.