Development and Evaluation of Light-Weight Active Noise Cancellation Earphones

• Main Authors: Sen M. Kuo, Yi-Rou Chen, Cheng-Yuan Chang, Chien-Wen Lai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-07-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: active noise control; light-weight earphone; natural sound; secondary path model
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/8/7/1178

This paper presents the development of active noise control (ANC) for light-weight earphones, and proposes using music or natural sound to estimate the critical secondary path model instead of extra random noise. Three types of light-weight ANC earphones including in-ear, earbud, and clip phones are developed. Real-time experiments are conducted to evaluate their performance using the built-in microphone inside KEMAR’s ear and to compare with commercially-available ANC headphones and earphones. Experimental results show that the developed light-weight ANC earphones achieve higher noise reduction than the commercial ANC headphones and earphones, and the in-ear ANC earphone has the best noise reduction performance.