Effect of adaptive howling canceler in active noise control

In active noise control, the transfer characteristic of an acoustic feedback path has a considerable influence on the stability of the control system. When the acoustic system has a feedback path, the control system often causes unstable behavior called howling. An adaptive howling canceler designed to prevent thin howling is studied in this paper. This adaptive howling canceler estimates the acoustic feedback path and acts to suppress the howling. In this paper, the effect of this adaptive howling canceler was considered for two different adaptive noise control algorithms. One was the conventional filtered-x LMS (least mean squares) algorithm and the other was the frequency-domain adaptive algorithm proposed by the authors. From computer simulations, it was shown that the howling canceler works effectively with the filtered-x LMS algorithm. On the other hand, the control system became unstable with the frequency-domain adaptive algorithm. To alleviate this unstable behavior, variable output gain was considered. A good result was obtained with this variable gain.