Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2024

Abstract

Wireless earbuds have been gaining increasing popularity and using them to make phone calls or issue voice commands requires the earbud microphones to pick up human speech. When the speaker is in a noisy environment, speech quality degrades significantly and requires speech enhancement (SE). In this paper, we present ClearSpeech, a novel deep-learningbased SE system designed for wireless earbuds. Specifically, by jointly using the earbud’s in-ear and out-ear microphones, we devised a suite of techniques to effectively fuse the two signals and enhance the magnitude and phase of the speech spectrogram. We built an earbud prototype to evaluate ClearSpeech under various settings with data collected from 20 subjects. Our results suggest that ClearSpeech can improve the SE performance significantly compared to conventional approaches using the out-ear microphone only. We also show that ClearSpeech can process user speech in real-time on smartphones.

Keywords

Speech enhancement, Smart earbuds, Earables, Audio processing

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

Volume

7

Issue

4

ISSN

2474-9567

Identifier

10.1145/3631409

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Download

Share

COinS