Technical Note

A robust ltered-s LMS algorithm for nonlinear active noise control

Nithin V. George

, Ganapati Panda
School of Electrical Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, Odisha 751013, India
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 22 October 2011
Received in revised form 9 February 2012
Accepted 14 February 2012
Available online 24 March 2012
Keywords:
Active noise control
Robust algorithm
Filtered-s least mean square algorithm
Functional link articial neural network
Impulsive noise
a b s t r a c t
The performance of a nonlinear active noise control (ANC) system based on the recently developed l-
tered-s least mean square (FsLMS) algorithm deteriorates when strong disturbances in the ANC system
are acquired by the microphones. To surmount this shortcoming, a novel robust FsLMS (RFsLMS) algo-
rithm is proposed for a functional link articial neural network (FLANN) based ANC system. The new
ANC system is least sensitive to such disturbances and does not call for any prior information on the noise
characteristics. The results obtained from simulation study establish the effectiveness of this new ANC
scheme.
2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The fundamental principle of active noise control (ANC) is the
destructive superposition of two waves. Because of potential
industrial applications and advances in digital signal processing,
ANC has emerged as one of the key research areas in recent years.
The ltered-x LMS (FxLMS) algorithm [1] is the most widely used
adaptive algorithm for a feed-forward ANC system. In an FxLMS
algorithm based ANC system, the primary path from the noise
source to the cancellation point is represented by the transfer func-
tion P(z), the transfer function of the secondary path (path from the
controller output to the cancellation point) is denoted by S(z). The
adaptive weights, W(z) of the controller are updated using the ref-
erence signal x(n) ltered through the secondary path model

Sz
and by the error signal e(n), sensed by the error microphone placed
at the cancellation point.
The FxLMS algorithm based ANC system provides satisfactory
performance if the primary and secondary paths as well as the con-
troller are linear in nature. However, in practice, the primary and
secondary paths are very often nonlinear. In addition, the primary
noise also exhibits nonlinear distortion. In such situations, the lin-
ear ANC system fails to effectively mitigate the noise to the desired
level. In order to improve the performance under such situations,
various nonlinear ANC systems have been proposed in the litera-
ture [2,3]. A Volterra FxLMS (VFxLMS) algorithm has been used
for an ANC system based on an adaptive Volterra lter [4]. Das
and Panda have developed a ltered-s LMS (FsLMS) algorithm for
nonlinear ANC systems, which uses a functional link articial neu-
ral network (FLANN) as the controller [5].
The presence of strong disturbances such as impulsive noise in
the ANC system affects the noise cancellation performance of the
system. An impulsive noise may be modelled as a symmetric a sta-
ble (SaS) distribution f(x) having a characteristic function of the
form
ut e
cjtj
a
1
where 0 < a < 2 is the characteristic exponent and c is a scale
parameter called as the dispersion factor [6]. When a tends to 2,
the distribution tends to be Gaussian. A smaller value of a indicates
a distribution with stronger impulsive noise. As second order mo-
ments do not exist for SaS processes, adaptive algorithms based
on fractional order have been developed for improving the perfor-
mance. A ltered-x least mean p power algorithm (FxLMP) has been
derived in literature for robust ANC systems which uses a fractional
order moment [7]. However, the FxLMP algorithm requires prior
knowledge of the characteristic exponent a, which is not available
in real time ANC systems. An online scheme for estimation of the
characteristic exponent has been proposed in [8]. A couple of
schemes have been recently developed to improve the performance
of FxLMP algorithm [9].
A robust weight constrained FxLMS (CFxLMS) algorithm is pro-
posed in [10], which updates the connecting weights W(n) of the
ANC system as
Wn 1 Wn len^sn xn 2
with Wn 1
Wn 1 if kWn 1k 6 b
b:Wn1
kWn1k
if kWn 1k > b
_
3
0003-682X/$ - see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2012.02.005

Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 9438227079; fax: +91 6742301983.

E-mail address: nithinvgeorge@gmail.com (N.V. George).
Applied Acoustics 73 (2012) 836841
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Applied Acoustics
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er . com/ l ocat e/ apacoust
where b is the constraining factor, l is the learning parameter, ^sn
is the impulse response of

Sz, is the linear convolution operator
and k.k denotes Euclidean norm. The robust performance of this
algorithm is directly dependent on suitable choice of the constrain-
ing factor, which has to be experimentally determined. Another ro-
bust FxLMS algorithm suggested in [11] is given by
Wn 1 Wn l~en^sn ~xn 4
where ~en and ~xn are the transformed error term and reference
signal respectively. The enhanced robustness of this algorithm to-
wards disturbances depends on proper selection of thresholds.
The online threshold estimation technique proposed in [12] may
be extended to this algorithm to improve the performance.
An active impulsive noise control algorithm, which is based on a
logarithmic transformation (FxlogLMS) has been recently proposed
[13]. The weights of this controller are updated using FxlogLMS
algorithm as
Wn 1 Wn lsignen
logjenj
jenj
^sn xn 5
with je(n)j = 1 for je(n)j < 1. Even though considerable research nd-
ings have been reported on the development of robust linear ANC
systems, there has been very little work on the development of ro-
bust nonlinear ANC systems. Thus, the aim of this paper is to formu-
late a robust learning algorithm for nonlinear ANC, which not only
takes care of the effects of nonlinearities but also remain stable in
the presence of disturbances such as impulsive noise.
2. Design of a robust nonlinear active noise controller
The controller proposed in this paper consists of a FLANN
(Fig. 1), the weights of which are updated using a novel robust
algorithm. The input to a FLANN is non-linearly expanded using
a suitable basis function. The basis function can be trigonometric,
Chebyshev or Legendre. The use of a Chebyshev or Legendre basis
function requires input normalization, which is not practically
possible when the ANC scheme deals with impulsive noises. This
paper uses a trigonometric expansion as it is simple to implement
and does not require amplitude normalization. This trigonometric
expansion not only increases the dimensionality, but also maps the
linear inputs to nonlinear ones. Each of the expanded inputs are
then linearly weighted and summed to produce the output.
Compared to other articial neural structure such as multilayer
articial neural network or radial basis function network, the
proposed structure involves low computational complexity.
Let x(n) be the output of the reference microphone and the
corresponding input signal vector is U(n) = [x(n),x(n 1), . . . ,
x(n M + 1)]
T
. The M-element input signal vector is trigonometri-
cally expanded to Nterms as
Xn xn; sinpxn; cospxn; . . . ; sinbpxn; cosbpxn; . . . ; xn
M1; sinpxnM1; cospxnM
1; . . . ; sinbpxnM1; cosbpxnM1
T
6
where b is the order of the FLANN lter and N = M(2b + 1). If
A
f
n a
f
1
na
f
2
n . . . a
f
N
n
T
represent the adaptive weight vector,
the output of the controller is given by
yn A
T
f
nXn: 7
The residual noise measured by the error microphone is given by
en dn sn yn 8
where d(n) is the primary noise signal at the cancellation point and
s(n) is the impulse response of the secondary path transfer function
S(z). Using (7), the residual noise may be rewritten as
en dn sn A
T
f
nXn: 9
The conventional FsLMS algorithm has been developed with the
objective of minimizing the cost function E(e
2
(n)), where E(.) is
the expectation operator. The FsLMS algorithm [5] is given by
A
f
n 1 A
f
n len

X
0
n 10
where

X
0
n ^sn Xn. From (10), it is clear that for higher val-
ues of e(n), as in the case of impulsive noise, the FsLMS algorithm
may diverge. To alleviate this problem, a robust cost function [14]
dened as
n E log 1
e
2
n
2r
2
_ _ _ _
11
is used in the development of a robust FsLMS (RFsLMS) algorithm
for tuning the parameters of an ANC system. In (11), r
2
is computed
as an estimated variance of e(n) using a sliding window approach
with a window length N
w
[8]. The weight vector A
f
(n) of an RFsLMS
algorithm based ANC scheme is updated using a gradient descent
approach [1] which minimizes the cost function in (11). The update
equation for the weight vector is given by
A
f
n 1 A
f
n
l
2
^
rn 12
where
^
rn denotes the instantaneous estimate of the gradient of
the cost function n with respect to the weight vector A
f
(n). This esti-
mate is derived as

$n
@ log 1
e
2
n
2r
2
_ _ _ _
@A
f
n
2
en
e
2
n 2r
2
_ _
X
0
n: 13
with X
0
(n) denoting a ltered version of X(n). Substituting (13) in
(12), RFsLMS algorithm is obtained as
A
f
n 1 A
f
n l
en
e
2
n 2r
2
_ _

X
0
n 14
where

X
0
n is obtained by ltering X(n) through a model of the sec-
ondary path. The proposed RFsLMS algorithm(14) uses of a function
of the error for weight updation instead of direct use of error signal
employed in FsLMS algorithm (10). Fig. 2 shows the transformation
function employed in RFsLMS algorithm with r
2
= 1. It can be ob-
served that for larger values of je(n)j, the weight updation is small
and thus the algorithm is stable. The performance is also improved
by the presence of the variance term in the denominator, which
tends to a small value for non-impulsive samples. Further, the im-
pact of high amplitude impulses appearing in the reference signal Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the proposed FLANN based adaptive controller.
N.V. George, G. Panda / Applied Acoustics 73 (2012) 836841 837
has been signicantly reduced by trigonometric expansion, which
limits the strength of the expanded reference signal samples to
[1, 1]. However, the terms x(n), x(n 1), . . . ,x(n M + 1) which
appear directly in the expanded signal vector X(n) could affect the
performance of the proposed scheme for very strong disturbances.
But such a situation can also be avoided if an adaptive thresholding
scheme as suggested in [12] is applied. The complete layout of the
new ANC scheme incorporating the weight update mechanism in
(14) is presented in Fig. 3.
2.1. Stability of RFsLMS algorithm
The range of the learning parameter l, which ensures stability
and monotonic convergence of RFsLMS algorithm is derived in this
section. Let A
f0
be the optimal weight vector of the robust adaptive
controller and (n) be the mismatch between A
f0
and A
f
(n), given
by
n A
f 0
A
f
n 15
After subtracting both sides of (14) from A
f0
, the following equation
is obtained.
n 1 n l
en
e
2
n 2r
2
_ _

X
0
n 16
Assuming D(n) as the expectation of the squared Euclidean norm i.e.
D(n) = E{k(n)k
2
}, (16) can be written as
Dn 1 Dn l
2
E
en
e
2
n 2r
2
_ _
2
k

X
0
nk
2
_ _
2lE
en
e
2
n 2r
2
_ _

T
n

X
0
n
_ _
17
For assured stability and convergence, D(n + 1) should be less than
D(n). Thus the bounds for l are obtained as
0 < l < 2
E
e
2
n
e
2
n2r
2
_ _ _ _
E
en
e
2
n2r
2
_ _
2
k

X
0
nk
2
_ _ 18
with the assumption that
T
n

X
0
n en.
10 5 0 5 10
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
e(n)
e
(
n
)
/
[
e
2
(
n
)
+
2
]
Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of the transformation in the proposed RFsLMS algorithm
[for r
2
= 1].
Fig. 3. The proposed FLANN based robust nonlinear ANC system trained using RFsLMS algorithm.
838 N.V. George, G. Panda / Applied Acoustics 73 (2012) 836841
3. Simulation study
The newly developed RFsLMS algorithm based ANC scheme is
evaluated for robust performance in this section. To achieve
fairness in comparison, the FxlogLMS algorithm has been
re-formulated for a FLANN based nonlinear ANC system. The new
FslogLMS algorithm is given by
A
f
n 1 A
f
n l signen
logjenj
jenj

X
0
n 19
with je(n)j = 1 for je(n)j < 1. The implementation of the term
logjenj
jenj
is
computationally expensive. For all values of je(n)j < 1, the FslogLMS
algorithm loses adaptiveness as logje(n)j becomes zero. In the sim-
ulation study, the effectiveness is assessed in terms of averaged
noise reduction (ANR), which is dened as
ANRn 20log
A
e
n
A
d
n
_ _
20
where A
e
(n) = kA
e
(n 1) + (1 k)je(n)j and A
d
(n) = kA
d
(n 1) +
(1 k)jd(n)j with A
e
(0) = 0, A
d
(0) = 0 and k very close to 1. The refer-
ence noise signal x(n) is generated as a symmetric alpha stable (SaS)
distribution using the MATLAB function stabrnd developed by
McCulloch based on [15].
3.1. Experiment 1: Minimum phase secondary path
In this experiment, the primary noise observed at the error
microphone is given by
dn un 2 d
1
u
2
n 2 d
2
u
3
n 1 21
where d
i
for i = 1,2 is a measure of the strength of the primary path
nonlinearity and u(n) = x(n)q(n), with q(n) as the impulse response
of the transfer function Q(z) = z
3
0.3z
4
+ 0.2z
5
. The secondary
path is considered to be of minimum phase with transfer function
S(z) = z
2
+ 0.5z
3
. Four different scenarios have been considered in
this section with (a) Case 1: a = 1.7 (b) Case 2: a = 1.8 (c) Case 3:
a = 1.9 (d) Case 4: a = 2.0. The rst case corresponds to a highly
impulsive noise, where as the fourth one denotes a distribution
which is Gaussian. From the plots of x(n) and d(n) shown in Fig. 4
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
x 10
4
200
100
0
100
200
300
Samples
M
a
g
n
i
t
u
d
e

(
S
a
m
p
l
e

V
a
l
u
e
)
(a)
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
x 10
4
6
4
2
0
2
x 10
5
Samples
M
a
g
n
i
t
u
d
e

(
S
a
m
p
l
e

V
a
l
u
e
)
(b)
Fig. 4. (a) Reference signal x(n) for a = 1.7 (b) Primary noise observed at the error
microphone for a = 1.7.
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x 10
4
15
10
5
0
5
Iterations
A
N
R

(
d
B
)
(a)
FsLMS
FslogLMS
RFsLMS
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x 10
4
15
10
5
0
5
Iterations
A
N
R

(
d
B
)
(b)
FsLMS
FslogLMS
RFsLMS
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x 10
4
15
10
5
0
5
Iterations
A
N
R

(
d
B
)
(c)
FsLMS
FslogLMS
RFsLMS
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x 10
4
15
10
5
0
5
Iterations
A
N
R

(
d
B
)
(d)
FsLMS
FslogLMS
RFsLMS
Fig. 5. Averaged noise reduction (ANR) in an ANC system with a minimum phase secondary path for SaS primary noise (a) Case 1: a = 1.7 (b) Case 2: a = 1.8 (c) Case 3: a = 1.9
(d) Case 4: a = 2.0.
N.V. George, G. Panda / Applied Acoustics 73 (2012) 836841 839
for a = 1.7, it can be observed that the presence of a nonlinear pri-
mary path can increase the noise magnitude many fold and makes
noise control challenging. The primary noise amplitude for a = 1.7
is much higher compared to that observed in the linear ANC scenar-
ios studied in [13] for a = 1.3. The various simulation parameters
employed in the study are M = 10, N
w
= 10 b = 3, d
1
= 0.08,
d
2
= 0.04, k = 0.999 and l = 2 10
3
. The learning rate have been se-
lected by trial and error.
TheANRcurves for all thefour cases aredepictedinFig. 5. It canbe
observedthat FsLMSalgorithmdivergesfor cases1, 2and3wherethe
reference signal is highly impulsive. Both RFsLMS and FslogLMS
algorithms are found to be stable for all the four cases. It can be also
seen that for case 4, when the noise distribution is Gaussian, the
ANR performance of RFsLMS algorithm is in close match with that
of conventional FsLMS algorithmwhereas the noise reduction capa-
bility of FslogLMS algorithmhas been observed to be deteriorating.
3.2. Experiment 2: Non-minimum phase secondary path
The experiment conducted in the previous sub-section has been
repeated in this part of the study for a non-minimum phase
secondary path. The transfer function of the secondary path is gi-
ven by
Sz z
2
1:5z
3
z
4
22
The primary noise, the transfer function of the primary path as well
as the simulation parameters are same as that of the previous
experiment. The ANR curves shown in Fig. 6 reafrms the improved
performance of RFsLMS algorithm over the conventional FsLMS and
FslogLMS algorithms. RFsLMS algorithm has been observed to per-
form equally well for Gaussian as well as non-Gaussian noise
processes.
The difference between (14) and (19) is in the computation of
the terms
en
e
2
n2r
2
and
logjenj
jenj
. A comparison has been made between
the computation time for both the terms using a 32 bit Windows 7
PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 2.10 GHz processor and 4 GB
RAM. The signal e(n) has been considered to be having an SaS distri-
bution with a = 1.7, 1.8, 1.9 and 2.0. From the computational times
shown in Table 1, it can be observed that for all the cases consid-
ered, the time required for evaluating
en
e
2
n2r
2
(with online estima-
tion of r
2
) is almost half of the time required for computing
logjenj
jenj
.
4. Conclusion
A robust nonlinear active noise control system has been devel-
oped in this paper. A new learning algorithm has been proposed for
the FLANN based nonlinear adaptive controller. The necessary
stability conditions have been derived. The proposed algorithm
has been shown to perform with similar levels of efciency for
Gaussian as well as non-Gaussian noise processes.
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x 10
4
15
10
5
0
5
Iterations
A
N
R

(
d
B
)
(a)
FsLMS
FslogLMS
RFsLMS
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x 10
4
15
10
5
0
5
Iterations
A
N
R

(
d
B
)
(b)
FsLMS
FslogLMS
RFsLMS
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x 10
4
15
10
5
0
5
Iterations
A
N
R

(
d
B
)
(c)
FsLMS
FslogLMS
RFsLMS
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x 10
4
15
10
5
0
5
Iterations
A
N
R

(
d
B
)
(d)
FsLMS
FslogLMS
RFsLMS
Fig. 6. Averaged noise reduction (ANR) in an ANC system with a non-minimum phase secondary path for SaS primary noise (a) Case 1: a = 1.7 (b) Case 2: a = 1.8 (c) Case 3:
a = 1.9 (d) Case 4: a = 2.0.
Table 1
Comparison of computational time per sample for
evaluating (a)
logjenj
jenj
, and (b)
en
e
2
n2r
2
.
a Time (ns) (a) Time (ns) (b)
1.7 113.22 63.54
1.8 108.15 62.05
1.9 110.23 63.72
2.0 109.58 62.46
840 N.V. George, G. Panda / Applied Acoustics 73 (2012) 836841
Acknowledgments
One of the authors, Nithin V. George, acknowledge the generous
funding received from Ministry of Human Resource Development,
Government of India for carrying out this work.
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