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1 Introduction
Since computers have become smaller and capable of higher levels of performance and with internet technologies being widely used, computers have become common in our daily life. In particular, since the advance of high-performance devices such as smartphones, wearable computing, in which users fix devices to their body, has attracted a great deal of attention. Users can get information and services by these devices anywhere and at anytime ([1] Kawai and Tomita, 2000). Environmental sounds are one of the most important information sources in our daily life, we can realize what is happening in our surroundings ([2] Matthews et al. , 2005). In recent years, there has been a lot of research on automatic sound source recognition by computers ([3] Asano et al. , 2001). These pieces of research are focused on the algorithm of recognition and show the result to users in text or pictures ([4] Ho-Ching et al. , 2003). However, this is not an ideal interface for the hearing-impaired for showing them the direction of the sound source ([5] Somervell et al. , 2002).
We propose a new interface of sound source recognition for the hearing-impaired using augmented reality (AR) that can show the user information in the real world by using a web camera and head-mounted display (HMD) ([6] Feiner et al. , 1997). Our system can recognize the environmental sound in realtime and inform the user of the type of sound by showing a virtual object in the user's sight. Furthermore, the user can find the direction of the sound source by using a microphone array and locate the sound source through the AR marker attached to the object.
This article consists of six parts: reference research in Section 2, detail of the system design in Section 3, system implementation in Section 4, evaluation in Section 5, and finally, the conclusion in Section 6.
2 References
There is currently a lot of research on sound visualization. For instance, in [7] Azar's et al. (2007) research, to find the easiest way to understand how to visualize sound, several methods of sound visualization are discussed. They discuss methods of sound visualization for environmental sound and speech, and the results of visualization are displayed in one form of the system....