Automotive volume control using fuzzy logic

Abstract

Advances in home and automotive and entertainment system technology have made it possible to offer exceptional sound quality reproduction to consumers. In recent years, automotive audio systems' quality has approached that of home systems. However, high and variable ambient noise levels remain difficult to overcome and impose a major limitation on the automotive sound system. Currently, some of these systems use classical controllers, which are based on the estimation of the ambient noise using the speed of the vehicle. Due to the effects of road and weather conditions and other factors such as the status of the windows or sunroof, these systems do not provide adequate noise compensation. Other systems measure the noise levels inside the vehicle and use complicated circuitry and algorithms for compensation. This paper introduces the application of fuzzy logic for automatic volume control in automotive systems that compensates for interior and exterior noise while excluding the effect of passengers' conservation. In stead of using simple table-based approaches which need excessive tuning or complex DSP approaches which need large processing power and suffer from non-linearity, we utilize the expertise of human drivers and the power of fuzzy logic to develop an automatic volume control that is simple to develop, easy to implement, and yet powerful. We have conducted several experiments on real audio signals and the results prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach.