In-Ear-Voice: Towards Milli-Watt Audio Enhancement With Bone-Conduction Microphones for In-Ear Sensing Platforms
Philipp Schilk, Niccolò Polvani, Andrea Ronco, Miloš Cerňak, Michele Magno
Abstract
The recent ubiquitous adoption of remote conferencing has been accompanied by omnipresent frustration with distorted or otherwise unclear voice communication. Audio enhancement can compensate for low-quality input signals from, for example, small true wireless earbuds, by applying noise suppression techniques. Such processing relies on voice activity detection (VAD) with low latency and the added capability of discriminating the wearer’s voice from others - a task of significant computational complexity. The tight energy budget of devices as small as modern earphones, however, requires any system attempting to tackle this problem to do so with minimal power and processing overhead, while not relying on speaker-specific voice samples and training due to usability concerns.