Active noise cancellation on open-ear smart glasses

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first real-time active noise cancellation system for open-ear smart glasses, using microphone arrays and mini speakers to reduce environmental noise without sealing the ear canal.

Contribution

It presents a novel ANC system specifically designed for open-ear smart glasses, overcoming the limitations of traditional ANC methods that require ear canal microphones.

Findings

Achieved a mean noise reduction of 9.6 dB without calibration.

Achieved a mean noise reduction of 11.2 dB with user-specific calibration.

System operates effectively in environments with 100-1000 Hz noise frequency range.

Abstract

Smart glasses are becoming an increasingly prevalent wearable platform, with audio as a key interaction modality. However, hearing in noisy environments remains challenging because smart glasses are equipped with open-ear speakers that do not seal the ear canal. Furthermore, the open-ear design is incompatible with conventional active noise cancellation (ANC) techniques, which rely on an error microphone inside or at the entrance of the ear canal to measure the residual sound heard after cancellation. Here we present the first real-time ANC system for open-ear smart glasses that suppresses environmental noise using only microphones and miniaturized open-ear speakers embedded in the glasses frame. Our low-latency computational pipeline estimates the noise at the ear from an array of eight microphones distributed around the glasses frame and generates an anti-noise signal in real-time to cancel environmental noise. We develop a custom glasses prototype and evaluate it in a user study across 8 environments under mobility in the 100--1000 Hz frequency range, where environmental noise is concentrated. We achieve a mean noise reduction of 9.6 dB without any calibration, and 11.2 dB with a brief user-specific calibration.