Soft-Constrained Spatially Selective Active Noise Control for Open-Fitting Hearables

Recent advances in spatially selective active noise control (SSANC) using multiple microphones have enabled hearables to suppress undesired noise while preserving desired speech from a specific direction. Aiming to achieve minimal speech distortion, a hard constraint has been used in previous work in the optimization problem to compute the control filter. In this work, we propose a soft-constrained SSANC system that uses a frequency-independent parameter to trade off between speech distortion and noise reduction. We derive both time- and frequency-domain formulations, and show that conventional active noise control and hard-constrained SSANC represent two limiting cases of the proposed design. We evaluate the system through simulations using a pair of open-fitting hearables in an anechoic environment with one speech source and two noise sources. The simulation results validate the theoretical derivations and demonstrate that for a broad range of the trade-off parameter, the signal-to-noise ratio and the speech quality and intelligibility in terms of PESQ and ESTOI can be substantially improved compared to the hard-constrained design.