Design, simulation and implementation of an active sound-noise cancellation system for use in a cockpit intercommunication system

Abstract

In this paper, an active noise control system for denoising the intercommunication signal of an airplane cockpit is proposed. Noise sources such as engines degrade the quality of the intercommunication signal, especially in the case of the pilot and copilot headsets. A two-microphone active adaptive noise controller is designed by using an adaptive FIR filter in an active structure. The designed system is simulated and also implemented in real environment using real speech signals, periodic noise and AWGN noise. Also, an FPGA-based hardware implementation utilizing a novel method is provided. The whole design is considered an FPGA hardware core with low resource utilizations which is suitable for HW/SW codesign and System-on-Programmable-Chip (SoPC) applications. The codes have been written by using the VHDL93 hardware description language, the XilKernel embedded operating system and a finite state machine. The obtained results showed competent functionality and performance of the proposed system. This ICS noise removal architecture can be used on any cargo, civil or fighter platform (such as C-130, IR-AN 140 and F5-F) and also in radar and electronic warfare (EW) systems (for clutter/interference compensation) with minimum hardware or software changes.