{"ID":2893917,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12122","arxiv_id":"2507.12122","title":"Soft-Constrained Spatially Selective Active Noise Control for Open-fitting Hearables","abstract":"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.","short_abstract":"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 p...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12122","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12122v1","authors":"[\"Tong Xiao\",\"Reinhild Roden\",\"Matthias Blau\",\"Simon Doclo\"]","published":"2025-07-16T10:47:05Z","proceeding":"eess.AS","tasks":"[\"eess.AS\",\"eess.SP\",\"eess.SY\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}