2.5D Multizone Reproduction with Active Control of Scattered Sound Fields

Multizone reproduction has been focused on reproducing sounds in an empty listening space. However, there are always scatterers such as human heads in sound zones, generating scattered sound fields and causing degraded system performance. In this work, we develop a modal-domain method for 2.5D multizone reproduction with a solid object in the bright zone. Analytical expressions of the incident and scattered fields are developed. We then propose an active control strategy to correct the scattering effect. In the reproduction stage, we use the weighted mode matching approach to achieve the optimal control over the entire region. Simulation results show that in comparison with the conventional method which does not consider the scattering effect, the proposed method can achieve higher acoustic contrast performance over a broadband frequency range.