Artificial Intelligence Could be Coming to Noise-Cancelling Headphones Soon
Among his team of researchers, AI expert Shyam Gollakota from the University of Washington found that AI can be used in real-time active noise cancellation to remove specific sounds without altering the headphone’s audio. The idea was presented on 16th May at a conference held by the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association, where his working prototype was demoed.
In the demo, Gollakota and his team used a smartphone-based neural network to identify, train and then filter 20 different environmental sound categories, such as alarm clocks and sirens, that one would hear daily. The user is required to select the sound category on their smartphone, which then begins the process of filtering out the environmental sound. The use case does not seem clear at first, but there are real work applications.
Gollakota explained, “Imagine you are in a park, admiring the sounds of chirping birds, but then you have the loud chatter of a nearby group of people who just can’t stop talking. Now imagine if your headphones could grant you the ability to focus on the sounds of the birds while the rest of the nose just goes away. That is exactly what we set out to achieve with our system”.
The prototype demoed at the conference shows microphones on both sides of the headphone’s earcups that are connected via USB to an OrangePi development board that also provides audio to the headphones via the audio jack. The development board in question seems to be the 5B model, which would have an eight-core 64-bit processor with a built-in neural processor. The chip can perform the real-time filtering required for the project. The phone is likely connected to the OrangePi wirelessly.
The team believes this technology can be implemented into audio devices and is ready for commercialization. They would need to find a way to integrate a neural processing unit (NPU) that is both small and powerful enough to do real time audio filtering while still fitting inside regular sized earphones. AI is starting to play a bigger and bigger role in our daily lives and will likely be imperative in future innovations.
