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arXiv · 2504.10793

SonicSieve: Bringing Directional Speech Extraction to Smartphones Using Acoustic Microstructures

Kuang Yuan·Yifeng Wang·Xiyuxing Zhang·Chengyi Shen·Swarun Kumar·Justin Chan
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Abstract

Imagine placing your smartphone on a table in a noisy restaurant and clearly capturing the voices of friends seated around you, or recording a lecturer's voice with clarity in a reverberant auditorium. We introduce SonicSieve, the first intelligent directional speech extraction system for smartphones using a bio-inspired acoustic microstructure. Our passive design embeds directional cues onto incoming speech without any additional electronics. It attaches to the in-line mic of low-cost wired earphones which can be attached to smartphones. We present an end-to-end neural network that processes the raw audio mixtures in real-time on mobile devices. Our results show that SonicSieve achieves a signal quality improvement of 5.0 dB when focusing on a 30{\deg} angular region. Additionally, the performance of our system based on only two microphones exceeds that of conventional 5-microphone arrays.

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Kuang Yuan, Yifeng Wang, Xiyuxing Zhang, Chengyi Shen, Swarun Kumar, Justin Chan. 2025-04-15. SonicSieve: Bringing Directional Speech Extraction to Smartphones Using Acoustic Microstructures. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790376

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