Real-Time Modelling of Observation Filter in the Remote Microphone Technique for an Active Noise Control Application

The remote microphone technique (RMT) is often used in active noise control (ANC) applications to overcome design constraints in microphone placements by estimating the acoustic pressure at inconvenient locations using a pre-calibrated observation filter (OF), albeit limited to stationary primary acoustic fields. While the OF estimation in varying primary fields can be significantly improved through the recently proposed source decomposition technique, it requires knowledge of the relative source strengths between incoherent primary noise sources. This paper proposes a method for combining the RMT with a new source-localization technique to estimate the source ratio parameter. Unlike traditional source-localization techniques, the proposed method is capable of being implemented in a real-time RMT application. Simulations with measured responses from an open-aperture ANC application showed a good estimation of the source ratio parameter, which allows the observation filter to be modelled in real-time.