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Active noise cancellation on open-ear smart glasses

arxiv.org/abs/2604.05519

quality89

Updated 2 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294FT4GPJQ6KJQG9QY1KSQX

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 2 h ago
arXiv
2604.05519
T1 · 2 h ago
Category
eess.AS
T1 · 2 h ago

Abstract

-cross Abstract: Active noise cancellation (ANC) is widely deployed on consumer headphones and earbuds to suppress environmental noise. However, existing ANC systems require an error microphone at the user's ear canal to measure residual sound, preventing deployment on emerging open-ear wearable devices such as smart glasses and VR headsets, which leave the ear unoccluded. Here we present an ANC system for open-ear wearables that suppresses environmental noise using only microphones and miniaturized open-ear speakers embedded within the frame of the wearables, removing the need for an in-ear error microphone. Our low-latency computational pipeline uses a neural network to estimate the noise at the ear from an array of eight microphones distributed around the wearable's frame and generates an anti-noise signal in real-time. This mapping generalizes to unseen users and acoustic environments without prior acoustic measurement. We develop a custom glasses prototype and evaluate across eleven unseen users and eight unseen environments under mobility in the 100 to 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. Further, we demonstrate that our approach extends to the broader class of open-ear wearables including VR headsets and headbands.

Authors 8

Kuang Yuan, Freddy Yifei Liu, Tong Xiao, Yiwen Song, Chengyi Shen, Saksham Bhutani, Justin Chan, Swarun Kumar

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Arxiv announce type
replace

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

arXiv id
2604.05519

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Categories
eess.AS, cs.HC, cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.SP

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Primary category
eess.AS

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

2 h ago

Conflicts

None