SonicSieve: Bringing Directional Speech Extraction to Smartphones Using Acoustic Microstructures
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.10793,
title = {SonicSieve: Bringing Directional Speech Extraction to Smartphones Using Acoustic Microstructures},
author = {Kuang Yuan and Yifeng Wang and Xiyuxing Zhang and Chengyi Shen and Swarun Kumar and Justin Chan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10793},
year = {2026}
}