Analysis of Earbud-Mounted Bone-Conduction Microphones

Authors:

Weyer, C. ,  Jax, P.

Book Title:

Proceedings of International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC)

Organization:

IEEE

Publisher:

IEEE

Date:

Sep. 2024

ISBN:

979-8-35036-185-8

DOI:

10.1109/IWAENC61483.2024.10694264

Language:

English

Abstract

Bone-conduction microphones (BCMs) capture the wearer’s
voice as vibrations of the body, and are therefore robust against
environmental and wind noise. It is well known that using a BCM
can increase speech enhancement performance. Modern earbuds can
be equipped with BCMs, presenting the opportunity to significantly
improve the quality of the wearer’s voice for the far end. However, it
is yet unclear how to optimally capture bone-conducted (BC) speech
at the earbud. This includes the question if BC speech can be captured
at higher bandwidth or SNR with some earbuds, but also how the
earbud vibration is oriented in space. The latter informs how many
spatial axes the BCM needs to record. In this paper we tackle these
questions based on measurements with different earbuds. Our results
indicate that for all analyzed earbuds the sensitivity towards BC
speech is similar and that all earbuds vibrate in a similar direction.

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