Feedback Active Noise Control Based Voice Enhancing Ear-Protection System

This paper proposes a voice enhancing ear-protection system which is based on feedback active noise control(FBANC). The proposed system selectively suppresses the background noise and preserves the talking voice by controlling the adaptive algorithm with the voice activity period detection module. The noise reduction performance of the proposed noise canceling algorithm is analytically derived for the two key performance affecting parameters, i.e., electro-acoustic coupling distance and noise bandwidth. The proposed system is also implemented with a floating-point DSP system and its performance is experimentally tested to compare with the analytically derived results. The achieved levels of noise reduction for the three different noise bandwidths cases, i.e., 10Hz, 50Hz, and 90Hz, are high to show 17.05dB, 10.54dB and 8.99dB, respectively. The feasibility of the proposed system is also shown by the peak noise reduction achieved more than 25dB while preserving the voice component in the frequency range between 200-800Hz.