Robust Fixed-Filter Sound Zone Control with Audio-Based Position Tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust sound zone control system that adaptively tracks listener positions using audio signals alone, maintaining effective sound zones despite listener movement and environmental changes.

Contribution

It presents a novel dictionary-based approach for audio-only listener position tracking to enhance fixed-filter sound zone control robustness.

Findings

Effective tracking of listener movement using audio signals.

Improved sound zone performance with partial dictionary coverage.

Robustness against environmental variations in practical scenarios.

Abstract

Performance of sound zone control (SZC) systems deployed in practical scenarios are highly sensitive to the location of the listener(s) and can degrade significantly when listener(s) are moving. This paper presents a robust SZC system that adapts to dynamic changes such as moving listeners and varying zone locations using a dictionary-based approach. The proposed system continuously monitors the environment and updates the fixed control filters by tracking the listener position using audio signals only. To test the effectiveness of the proposed SZC method, simulation studies are carried out using practically measured impulse responses. These studies show that SZC, when incorporated with the proposed audio-only position tracking scheme, achieves optimal performance when all listener positions are available in the dictionary. Moreover, even when not all listener positions are included in the dictionary, the method still provides good performance improvement compared to a traditional fixed filter SZC scheme.