Using A-weighting for psychoacoustic active noise control

Conventional adaptive active noise control (ANC) methods aim to attenuate the acoustic noise over the frequency band of interest indiscriminately using the sound pressure level (SPL) measurement (or the measurement of the residual error variance). However, SPL does not correctly reflect the human perception of attenuated noise due to the frequency selective sensitivity of human hearing system. A-weighting is a commonly used weighting filter for measuring the noise. This weighting filter quantifies frequency response of the human ears and hearing system. In this paper, we aim to improve the performance of adaptive noise cancellation method from the psychoacoustic point of view by incorporating the A-weighting into the ANC system design. Loudness is used as the psychoacoustic criterion for evaluating the ANC system performance. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.