The low-frequency noise generated by the vibration of the compressor in the machinery room of refrigerators is considered as annoying sound. Active noise control is used to reduce this noise without any change in the design of the compressor in the machinery room. In configuring the
control system, various signals are measured and analyzed to select the reference signal that best represents the compressor noise. As the space inside the machinery room is small, the size of a speaker is limited, and the magnitude of the controller transfer function is designed to be small
at low frequencies, the controller uses FIR filter structure converged by the FxLMS algorithm using the pre-measured time signal. To manage the convergence speed for each frequency, the frequency-weighting function is applied to FxLMS algorithm. A series of measurements are performed to design
the controller and to evaluate the control performance. After the control, the sound power transmitted by the refrigerator is reduced by 9 dB at the first dominant frequency (408 Hz in this case) and 3 dB at the second dominant frequency (459 Hz here), and the overall sound power decreases
by 2.6 dB. Through this study, an active control system for the noise generated by refrigerator compressors is established.
Multiple blind sound source localization is the key technology for a myriad of applications such as robotic navigation and indoor localization. However, existing solutions can only locate a few sound sources simultaneously due to the limitation imposed by the number of microphones in an array. To this end, this paper proposes a novel multiple blind sound source localization algorithms using Source seParation and BeamForming (SPBF). Our algorithm overcomes the limitations of existing solutions and can locate more blind sources than the number of microphones in an array. Specifically, we propose a novel microphone layout, enabling salient multiple source separation while still preserving their arrival time information. After then, we perform source localization via beamforming using each demixed source. Such a design allows minimizing mutual interference from different sound sources, thereby enabling finer AoA estimation. To further enhance localization performance, we design a new spectral weighting function that can enhance the signal-to-noise-ratio, allowing a relatively narrow beam and thus finer angle of arrival estimation. Simulation experiments under typical indoor situations demonstrate a maximum of only 4∘ even under up to 14 sources.
Context-Aware Recommender System (CARS) suggests more relevant services by adapting them to the user’s specific context situation. Nevertheless, the use of many contextual factors can increase data sparsity while few context parameters fail to introduce the contextual effects in recommendations. Moreover, several CARSs are based on similarity algorithms, such as cosine and Pearson correlation coefficients. These methods are not very effective in the sparse datasets. This paper presents a context-aware model to integrate contextual factors into prediction process when there are insufficient co-rated items. The proposed algorithm uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to learn the latent interests of users from the textual descriptions of items. Then, it integrates both the explicit contextual factors and their degree of importance in the prediction process by introducing a weighting function. Indeed, the PSO algorithm is employed to learn and optimize weights of these features. The results on the Movielens 1 M dataset show that the proposed model can achieve an F-measure of 45.51% with precision as 68.64%. Furthermore, the enhancement in MAE and RMSE can respectively reach 41.63% and 39.69% compared with the state-of-the-art techniques.
Although a controller is well-tuned for set-point tracking, it shows poor control results for load disturbance rejection and vice versa. In this paper, a modified two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) control framework to solve this problem is proposed, and an optimal tuning method for the pa-rameters of each proportional integral derivative (PID) controller is discussed. The unique feature of the proposed scheme is that a feedforward controller is embedded in the parallel control structure to improve set-point tracking performance. This feedforward controller and the standard PID con-troller are combined to create a new set-point weighted PID controller with a set-point weighting function. Therefore, in this study, two controllers are used: a set-point weighted PID controller for set-point tracking and a conventional PID controller for load disturbance rejection. The parameters included in the two controllers are tuned separately to improve set-point tracking and load dis-turbance rejection performances, respectively. Each controller is optimally tuned by genetic algo-rithm (GA) in terms of minimizing the IAE performance index, and what is special at this time is that it also tunes the set-point weighting parameter simultaneously. The simulation results performed on four virtual processes verify that the proposed method shows better performance in set-point tracking and load disturbance rejection than those of the other methods.
Towards Robust Multiple Blind Source Localization Using Source Separation and Beamforming