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.

翻译：智能眼镜正成为日益普及的可穿戴平台，音频是其关键交互方式之一。然而，在嘈杂环境中听清声音仍具挑战性，因为智能眼镜配备开放式扬声器，不会封闭耳道。此外，开放式设计与传统主动降噪（ANC）技术不兼容，后者依赖位于耳道内或入口处的误差麦克风来测量降噪后的残余声音。本文首次提出针对开放式智能眼镜的实时ANC系统，仅利用嵌入眼镜框架内的麦克风和微型开放式扬声器抑制环境噪声。我们的低延迟计算管线通过分布在眼镜框架周围的八个麦克风阵列估计耳部噪声，并实时生成反噪声信号以消除环境噪声。我们开发了定制眼镜原型，并在8种移动环境下的100–1000 Hz频率范围（环境噪声集中区域）进行用户研究评估。该系统在无需校准的情况下实现平均9.6 dB的降噪量，经过简短的用户特定校准后可达到11.2 dB。