A reservoir computing approach in active noise control for vehicle applications

Reservoir Computing (RC) is an alternative approach to Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) that can avoid some shortcomings of conventional gradient decent-training that are mainly related to high computational complexity and the reduced ability to "learn" long-range dependencies. In RC the input data are transformed into patterns in a high-dimensional space by an RNN called the "reservoir", which remains unchanged during training. The desired output signal is generated as a linear combination of the neuron's signals from the input-excited reservoir. The linear part of the RC architecture, which is called the "readout" can be trained with a simple learning algorithm such as linear regression. In this work an RC architecture is proposed for the attenuation of acoustic disturbances encountered in vehicle cabins such as aircrafts and yachts. At first, a dataset of acoustic pressure measurements from real-world cabins was used to generate the readout and reservoir layers. Subsequent computer simulations demonstrated that the proposed architecture can successfully attenuate such acoustic disturbances. Finally, the performance of RC in Active Noise Cancellation task was compared with both the linear FxLMS algorithm and a conventional RNN, showing that it has several advantages regarding acoustic pressure reduction combined with relatively low computational complexity.