Korean Professor and Meta Unveil Virtual-Mic AI Noise Cancelling for Smart Glasses

At a glance

Professor Lee Dong-heon's team at Pukyong National University, working with Meta, built a technology called Virtual-Flow that reduces noise in tiny devices like smart glasses. With only 4 real microphones, it reaches performance comparable to a 16-microphone array.

Key points

1. 1

   Four real microphones plus virtual ones deliver speech enhancement comparable to a high-performance array of 16 or more microphones.

2. 2

   It creates virtual spatial information without ground-truth data and cuts computation by using timing differences between microphone signals.

3. 3

   It also performed stably in tests with real noisy environments and moving speakers.

4. 4

   The research was accepted as a paper at NeurIPS 2026, a top AI conference.

Why it matters

Smart glasses and wireless earbuds have room for few microphones, so noisy calls are a common problem. This work points to fixing it with software..

Also reported by

• LG헬로비전국립부경대 이동헌 교수, Meta와 ‘AI 글래스용 노이즈 캔슬링 기술’ 개발
• CNB뉴스국립부경대 이동헌 교수, Meta와 AI 글래스용 노이즈 캔슬링 기술 개발