Robust Soft-Constrained Spatially Selective Active Noise Control for Hearables Under Secondary Path Variations

Abstract

Spatially selective active noise control (SSANC) hearables aim to attenuate noise from certain directions at the eardrum while preserving desired speech arriving from selected directions. Existing SSANC systems typically assume an accurate estimate of the secondary path from the loudspeaker to the inner error microphone. In practice, however, this path varies across users and device fits, which can degrade performance and compromise system stability. This paper proposes a robust soft-constrained optimization framework that computes a single control filter by minimizing the average cost over a set of secondary-path estimates derived from human measurements. Simulations show that the proposed approach achieves slightly lower mean performance than the matched case but substantially narrows the performance spread under secondary-path mismatch. Real-time experiments using the tested head-and-torso simulator show good agreement with the simulations.

5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted at the 19th International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC 2026). Camera-ready version revised after peer review; main results unchanged