Active headrest combined with a depth camera-based ear-positioning system
Yuteng Liu, Haowen Li, Haishan Zou, Jing Lu, Zhibin Lin
TL;DR
The paper addresses the challenge of maintaining effective local ANC with an active headrest when the user's head moves. It introduces an ear-positioning system that fuses RTMpose-based $2D$ ear detection with depth-camera $3D$ localization to track ear positions in real time. A symmetry-based post-processing module handles occlusions, enabling robust $3D$ ear coordinates even under rotation and occlusion. Experiments demonstrate sub-centimeter translation accuracy, rotations up to $±60^{\circ}$, and substantial NR gains, showing the method improves practical ANC performance for moving heads in automotive and room environments.
Abstract
Active headrests can reduce low-frequency noise around ears based on active noise control (ANC) system. Both the control system using fixed control filters and the remote microphone-based adaptive control system provide good noise reduction performance when the head is in the original position. However, their performance degrades significantly when the head is in motion. In this paper, a human ear-positioning system based on the depth camera is introduced to address this problem. The system uses RTMpose model to estimate the two-dimensional (2D) positions of the ears in the color frame, and then derives the corresponding three-dimensional (3D) coordinates in the depth frame with a depth camera. Experimental results show that the ear-positioning system can effectively track the movement of ears, and the broadband noise reduction performance of the active headrest combined with the system is significantly improved when the human head is translating or rotating.