A narrowband active noise control (NANC) system is very effective for controlling low-frequency periodic noise. A frequency mismatch (FM) with the reference signal will degrade the performance or even cause the system to diverge. To deal with an FM and obtain an accurate reference signal, NANC systems often employ a frequency estimator. Combining an autoregressive predictive filter with a variable step size (VSS) all-pass-based lattice adaptive notch filter (ANF), a new frequency estimation method is proposed that does not require prior information of the primary signal, and the convergence characteristics are much improved. Simulation results show that the designed frequency estimator has a higher accuracy than the conventional algorithm. Finally, hardware experiments are carried out to verify the noise reduction effect.

Usually an FIR filter is used to model the physical paths in an active noise control system. However, the order of the filter to be modeled is a key factor for determining the computational load for the adaptive algorithms associated with active noise control (ANC), particularly for multi-channel algorithms. In this letter, the relationships among the filter's order, the plant modeling error and the location of poles for the transfer functions of the physical paths in an ANC system are theoretically examined and numerical examples are given to verify the theoretical results.