Patent Application
20240038211
The field of representative embodiments of this disclosure relates to audio signal processing methods and circuits that suppress ambient noise with a filter having a dynamically selectable response, in which filter selection is made based on reference and error signal phase differences.
Personal audio devices, including personal communications devices are frequently operated in the vicinity of ambient noise sources, such as room noise, traffic noise, machinery noise, etc. Performance of such devices with respect to intelligibility of voice communications or program audio can be improved by providing noise-canceling using a microphone to measure ambient acoustic events and then using signal processing to insert an anti-noise signal into the output of the device to cancel the ambient acoustic events/noise.
Since the acoustic environment around the personal audio devices may change dramatically, depending on the sources of noise that are present and the position of the device itself, it is generally desirable to adapt the noise canceling to take into account such environmental changes. In particular, for earspeakers, the “fit” of the earspeakers to the user's ears may alter the performance of the noise canceling system significantly. Adaptive noise canceling circuits, in particular those that can adapt to both the ambient noise and the position of the device or fit of earspeakers, can be complex, consume additional power, and may generate undesirable results under certain circumstances, including instabilities due to changes in the acoustic environment. In order to provide effective noise-canceling, the latency of the anti-noise signal with respect to the reference source from the microphone also must be maintained at a minimal delay.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a low power audio processing system for a personal audio device that effectively cancels ambient noise, while adapting to changes in the acoustic environment of the device, including earspeaker fit and/or device positioning.
Reduced complexity/power of an adaptive noise-canceling system that adapts to changes in the acoustic environment of a personal audio device may be accomplished in systems and their methods of operation.
The adaptive noise-canceling system generates an anti-noise signal with a filter. The filter has a response controlled by a set of coefficients selected from a collection of coefficient sets. The adaptive noise-canceling system includes an acoustic output transducer for reproducing a signal containing the anti-noise signal, a first microphone for measuring ambient noise at a first location to produce a first noise measurement signal, a second microphone for measuring the ambient noise at a second location to generate a second noise measurement signal, and an analysis subsystem for analyzing the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal. The adaptive noise-canceling system also includes a controller that selects the set of coefficients from the collection of coefficient sets according to a phase difference between the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal as determined by the analysis subsystem.
The summary above is provided for brief explanation and does not restrict the scope of the Claims. The description below sets forth example embodiments according to this disclosure. Further embodiments and implementations will be apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art. Persons having ordinary skill in the art will recognize that various equivalent techniques may be applied in lieu of, or in conjunction with, the embodiments discussed below, and all such equivalents are encompassed by the present disclosure.
The present disclosure encompasses adaptive noise-canceling (ANC) systems that generate an anti-noise signal with a filter having a response controlled by a set of coefficients selected from a collection of coefficient sets. The adaptive noise-canceling system may include an acoustic output transducer for reproducing a signal containing the anti-noise signal, a first microphone for measuring ambient noise at a first location to produce a first noise measurement signal, a second microphone for measuring the ambient noise at a second location to generate a second noise measurement signal, and an analysis subsystem for analyzing the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal. The adaptive noise-canceling system may also include a controller that selects the set of coefficients from the collection of coefficient sets according to a phase difference between the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal as determined by the analysis subsystem. The filter may be an infinite-impulse response (IIR) filter or a finite-impulse response (FIR) filter and another adaptive filter may be included to model a secondary electro-acoustic path between the output of the ANC system and an error microphone that measures the acoustic output of the acoustic output transducer. Selective operation may be provided between the selection of coefficients according to the phase difference and selection of coefficients according to a classification of the secondary electro-acoustic path, depending on the presence or absence of playback audio in the ANC system. The ANC system may first adjust a gain applied to the anti-noise signal according to a coarse phase measurement, and then select the coefficient set to adapt the filter according to a phase difference across multiple frequency bins.
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Wireless telephone 10 includes adaptive noise canceling (ANC) circuits and systems that inject an anti-noise signal into speaker SPKR to improve intelligibility of the distant speech and other audio reproduced by speaker SPKR. A reference microphone R may be provided for measuring the ambient acoustic environment and positioned away from a typical position of a user's mouth, so that the near-end speech is minimized in the signal produced by reference microphone R. A third microphone, error microphone E, may be provided in order to further improve ANC operation by providing a measure of the ambient audio combined with the audio reproduced by speaker SPKR close to an ear 3 of the user, when wireless telephone 10 is in proximity to ear 3. A circuit 12 within wireless telephone 10 may include an audio CODEC integrated circuit 20 that receives the signals from reference microphone R, near-speech microphone N, and error microphone E and interfaces with other integrated circuits such as an RF integrated circuit 14 containing the wireless telephone transceiver. In some embodiments of the disclosure, the circuits and techniques disclosed herein may be incorporated in a single integrated circuit that contains control circuits and other functionality for implementing the entirety of the personal audio device, such as an MP3 player-on-a-chip integrated circuit. In the depicted embodiments and other embodiments, the circuits and techniques disclosed herein may be implemented partially or fully in software and/or firmware embodied in computer-readable storage media and executable by a processor circuit or other processing device such as a microcontroller.
In general, the ANC techniques disclosed herein measure ambient acoustic events and noise (as opposed to the output of speaker SPKR and/or the near-end speech) impinging on error microphone E and/or reference microphone R. The ANC processing circuits of illustrated wireless telephone 10 generate an anti-noise signal generated from the output of error microphone E and/or reference microphone R to have a characteristic that minimizes the amplitude of the ambient acoustic events present at error microphone E, although continuous and exact estimation of the required anti-noise signal is not a requirement of the disclosure. In particular, compensation for an acoustic path P that extends from reference microphone R to error microphone E may be performed adaptively and/or may be selected, and may be implemented by a feed-forward filter, a feedback filter or a feed-forward/feedback combined filter response that is adapted to a particular user by measuring a phase difference between multiple microphone signals in acoustic environment of wireless telephone 10. In the example ANC systems, the filter compensates for acoustic path P, combined with removing effects of an electro-acoustic path S that represents the response of the audio output circuits of CODEC IC 20 and the acoustic/electric transfer function of speaker SPKR including the coupling between speaker SPKR and error microphone E in the particular acoustic environment, i.e., including the fit and head/ear characteristics of the user. Electro-acoustic path S is affected by the proximity and structure of ear 5 and other physical objects and human head structures that may be in proximity to wireless telephone 10, in particular, when wireless telephone 10 is not firmly pressed to ear 5. While the illustrated wireless telephone 10 includes a two microphone ANC system with a third near-speech microphone N, other systems that do not include separate error and reference microphones may implement the above-described techniques. Alternatively, near-speech microphone N may be used to perform the function of the reference microphone R in the above-described system. Also, in personal audio devices designed only for audio playback, near-speech microphone N will generally not be included, and the near-speech signal paths in the circuits described in further detail below may be omitted without changing the scope of the disclosure.
The techniques disclosed herein may also be applied in purely noise-canceling systems that do not reproduce a playback signal or conversation using the output transducer, i.e., those systems that only reproduce an anti-noise signal. As used in this disclosure, the terms “headphone” and “speaker” refer to any acoustic transducer intended to be mechanically held in place proximate to a user's ear canal and include, without limitation, earphones, earbuds, and other similar devices. As more specific examples, “earbuds” or “headphones” may refer to intra-concha earphones, supra-concha earphones and supra-aural earphones. Further, the techniques disclosed herein are applicable to other forms of acoustic noise canceling, and the term “transducer” includes headphone or speaker type transducers, but also other vibration generators such as piezo-electric transducers, magnetic vibrators such as motors, and the like. The term “sensor” includes microphones, but also includes vibration sensors such as piezo-electric films, and the like.
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A pair of fast-Fourier transform (FFT) analysis blocks 35A and 35B analyze reference microphone signal Ref and playback-corrected error signal PBCE and a phase comparison block 37 provides a comparison between the phase of the noise signals present in reference microphone signal Ref and error microphone signal Err. A stability/convergence check block 38 analyzes the phase difference output(s) of phase comparison block 37 to determine whether a reliable phase difference has been obtained, i.e., whether or not the phase difference is changing and/or whether the changes appear to be due to gradual shifts, or due to instability. Controller receives the phase difference information from phase comparison block 37 and stability/convergence information from stability/convergence check block 38 and first adjusts the gain of adjustable gain stage 46 to obtain a stable phase measurement. Once a stable phase measurement has been obtained, controller 50 fixes the gain of adjustable gain stage 46 and begins selecting coefficient sets 42 to adjust the phase difference between reference microphone signal Ref and playback-corrected error signal PBCE to obtain a target phase difference, which is nominally 90 degrees. The phase of reference microphone signal Ref is ideally not dependent on the response provided by the combination of adjustable gain stage 46 and filter 40, as anti-noise signal Anti-Noise should not be introduced to reference microphone R by acoustic output transducer SPKR. Any leakage between acoustic output transducer SPKR and reference microphone R may be removed by other known adaptive filter techniques, or can be disregarded.
Phase comparison block 37 may provide phase difference information for multiple frequency bins represented by the outputs of FFT analysis blocks 35A, 35B, and controller 50 may observe the phase differences to inform selection of a next coefficient set that controller 50 selects from lookup table 42, and changes from one coefficient set to the next may be smoothed by a smoothing block 43, which may interpolate between coefficients as changes in coefficient sets are applied. Lookup table 42 generally provides fine gradations in response that may be indexed by an amount of phase difference indicated by the output(s) of phase comparison block 37 and/or by a phase trend across multiple frequency bins, i.e., a change of phase from bin-to-bin that is progressive in one direction may indicate a direction in lookup table 42 in which controller 50 should advance selection. In general, ANC system 30A may provide low power consumption, in that the portion of ANC system 30A other than adjustable gain stage 46, filter 40, and the data path from reference microphone signal Ref to adjustable gain stage 46, may operate at a much lower sample rate than filter 40. The lower sample rate of the other blocks in ANC system 30A does not affect the latency of filter 40 in performing noise-canceling, and thus provides an example of a low-latency noise-canceling solution that can be performed with reasonable circuit complexity and energy use. While additional adaptation of coefficients of filter 40 may be performed, the sets of coefficients provided to filter 40 may in some example embodiments, be the only adjustment made to filter 40. While the above description is that of a feed-forward (FF) ANC system, a feedback (FB) ANC system may be alternatively employed, e.g., by using playback corrected error signal PBCE as the input to adjustable gain stage 46 as shown in a dashed line, rather than the reference microphone signal Ref.
The coefficients in lookup table 42 may be custom-designed, or may be produced by any of the off-line design processes described in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 17/468,990 filed on Sep. 8, 2021 and entitled “ACTIVE NOISE CANCELLATION SYSTEM USING INFINITE IMPULSE RESPONSE FILTERING”, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. The sets of coefficients represent a reduced set of potential responses selectable for filter 40, which correspond to nominal users having different head and ear canal characteristics, i.e., to different classes of users, distinguished by those characteristics.
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A playback detection circuit 51 generates a control signal provided to a master switching control block 58, that, when playback audio playback has content, changes a mode of operation of ANC circuit 30B. Alternatively, an indication may be provided from an upstream block indicating that the overall audio system has playback content to master switching control block 58, in order to change the mode of operation. An FFT and phase comparison block 47 encompasses the analysis and phase detection circuits shown in
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As mentioned above, portions of the disclosed processes may be carried out by the execution of a collection of program instructions forming a computer program product stored on a non-volatile memory, but that also exist outside of the non-volatile memory in tangible forms of storage forming a computer-readable storage medium. The computer-readable storage medium may be, for example, but is not limited to, an electronic storage device, a magnetic storage device, an optical storage device, an electromagnetic storage device, a semiconductor storage device, or any suitable combination of the foregoing. Specific examples of the computer-readable storage medium include the following: a hard disk, semiconductor volatile and non-volatile memory devices, a portable compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM) or a digital versatile disk (DVD), a memory stick, a floppy disk or other suitable storage device not specifically enumerated. A computer-readable storage medium, as used herein, is not to be construed as being transitory signals, such as transmission line or radio waves or electrical signals transmitted through a wire. It is understood that blocks of the block diagrams described above may be implemented by computer-readable program instructions executed by a digital signal processor (DSP) or other processor that executes computer-readable program instructions. These computer readable program instructions may also be stored in other storage forms as mentioned above and may be downloaded into a non-volatile memory for execution therefrom. However, the collection of instructions stored on media other than system non-volatile memory described above also form a computer program product that is an article of manufacture including instructions which implement aspects of the functions/actions specified in the block diagram block or blocks.
In summary, this disclosure shows and describes adaptive noise-canceling circuits, systems and methods of operation of the systems and circuits that generates an anti-noise signal from a noise reference signal. The adaptive noise-canceling systems may include a filter for generating the anti-noise signal that has a response controlled by a set of coefficients selected from a collection of coefficient sets, an acoustic output transducer for reproducing a signal containing the anti-noise signal, a first microphone for measuring ambient noise at a first location to produce a first noise measurement signal and a second microphone for measuring the ambient noise at a second location to generate a second noise measurement signal. The adaptive noise-canceling system may include an analysis subsystem for analyzing the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal and a controller that selects the set of coefficients from the collection of coefficient sets according to a phase difference between the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal as determined by the analysis subsystem. In some example embodiments, the filter may be an infinite-impulse response (IIR) filter and in other example embodiments, the filter may be a finite-impulse response (FIR) filter.
In some example embodiments, the controller may select an initial set of coefficients for the response of the filter, and the initial set of coefficients may represent a nominal response determined from an average of responses required to compensate for the acoustic environment of the acoustic output transducer over a plurality of potential users. In some example embodiments, the system may include an adjustable gain stage coupled in functional series with the filter, and the controller may, responsive to the phase difference between the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal, adjust the adjustable gain stage to obtain an operational gain state of a combination of the adjustable gain stage and the filter. The controller may also determine whether the combination of the adjustable gain stage and the filter are in the operational gain state by evaluating a stability of the phase difference between the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal. In some example embodiments, the controller may determine whether the combination of the adjustable gain stage and the filter are in the operational gain state by evaluating an angle of the phase difference between the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal. In some example embodiments, the controller may, subsequent to obtaining the operational gain state, further select an operating set of coefficients for the filter according to phase differences between the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal as determined by the analysis subsystem for multiple corresponding frequency bins, and the controller may evaluate the phase differences to determine a phase trend across the multiple frequency bins, and may further select from among the collection of sets of coefficients for the filter according to the phase trend to obtain the operating set of coefficients. In some example embodiments, the controller may dynamically select the operating set of coefficients to maintain the phase differences across the multiple frequency bins within a predetermined bound.
In some example embodiments, the coefficients may select between multiple filter types and characteristics of the filter and in some example embodiments, the controller may further perform smoothing between selected sets of coefficients when making a change in selection of the set of coefficients. In some example embodiments, the filter may generate the anti-noise signal from the first microphone signal as a noise reference signal to provide a feed-forward architecture.
In some example embodiments, the second location may be proximate the acoustic output transducer, so that the second microphone measures an acoustic environment of the acoustic output transducer to produce the second microphone signal as an error signal. In some example embodiments the filter may generate the anti-noise signal from the error signal to provide a feedback architecture. In some example embodiments, the adaptive noise-canceling system may include a secondary-path estimating adaptive filter that filters the second microphone signal to remove components of the second microphone signal other than the ambient noise to generate the error signal. In some example embodiments, the system may further include a classifier for classifying values of coefficients of the secondary-path estimating adaptive filter to provide a classification indication, and the controller may determine whether the signal containing the anti-noise signal provided to the acoustic output transducer further contains program audio, and may, responsive to determining that the signal containing the anti-noise signal provided to the acoustic output transducer contains the program audio, select the set of coefficients from the collection of coefficient sets according to a phase difference between the first noise measurement signal and the second noise measurement signal as determined by the analysis subsystem, and may, responsive to determining that the signal containing the anti-noise signal provided to the acoustic output transducer does not contain the program audio, select one of the collection of sets of coefficients according to the classification indication provided by the classifier. In some example embodiments, the classifier may transform the second response modeling the secondary acoustic path to a lower-dimensional subspace of parameters, so that the controller may select the set of first coefficients according to the parameters.
It should be understood, especially by those having ordinary skill in the art with the benefit of this disclosure, that the various operations described herein, particularly in connection with the figures, may be implemented by other circuitry or other hardware components. The order in which each operation of a given method is performed may be changed, and various elements of the systems illustrated herein may be added, reordered, combined, omitted, modified, etc. It is intended that this disclosure embrace all such modifications and changes and, accordingly, the above description should be regarded in an illustrative rather than a restrictive sense. Similarly, although this disclosure makes reference to specific embodiments, certain modifications and changes may be made to those embodiments without departing from the scope and coverage of this disclosure. Moreover, any benefits, advantages, or solutions to problems that are described herein with regard to specific embodiments are not intended to be construed as a critical, required, or essential feature or element.
While the disclosure has shown and described particular embodiments of the techniques disclosed herein, it will be understood by those skilled in the art that the foregoing and other changes in form, and details may be made therein without departing from the spirit and scope of the disclosure. For example, the disclosed system may be used to cancel vibration or other non-audio frequency noise.
