A Distributed Algorithm for Personal Sound Zones Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed adaptive algorithm for Personal Sound Zones systems that reduces computational load across multiple nodes, enabling efficient multi-user audio zones in dynamic environments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel distributed algorithm that spreads computational tasks across nodes, decreasing complexity while maintaining acceptable performance in adaptive PSZ systems.

Findings

Simulation with real room impulse responses validates the approach.

Distributed algorithm reduces computational load significantly.

Performance decrease is minimal compared to centralized methods.

Abstract

A Personal Sound Zones (PSZ) system aims to generate two or more independent listening zones that allow multiple users to listen to different music/audio content in a shared space without the need for wearing headphones. Most existing studies assume that the acoustic paths between loudspeakers and microphones are measured beforehand in a stationary environment. Recently, adaptive PSZ systems have been explored to adapt the system in a time-varying acoustic environment. However, because a PSZ system usually requires multiple loudspeakers, the multichannel adaptive algorithms impose a high computational load on the processor. To overcome that problem, this paper proposes an efficient distributed algorithm for PSZ systems, which not only spreads the computational burden over multiple nodes but also reduces the overall computational complexity, at the expense of a slight decrease in performance. Simulation results with true room impulse responses measured in a Hemi-Anechoic chamber are performed to verify the proposed distributed PSZ system.