Over the years there have been many headlines regarding teens having been killed, maimed or severely injured due to wearing earbuds and not paying attention to their surroundings, especially near crosswalks. One report pointed to the Toronto Police mentioning Apple’s AirPods as a problem, though it’s more of generic earphones issue in general. The issue is a global issue, with another major case in the UK in 2020.
While Apple has focused on advancing health sensors to their AirPods, Huawei, Apple’s competitor in China, has filed for a patent wherein their future audio earwear devices may integrate world cameras and use AI to detect intersections and objects quickly approaching the wearer. Earwear designed with integrated cameras can be used for pattern recognition, gesture recognition, 3D recognition of goods and objects, 3D scanning and 3D photography. It is an object of this patent to provide a camera-enabled earwear with systems and methods that extends the user’s view. Another object of the present disclosure is to perform real-time and on-board processing of several computer vision tasks that understand the user and their environment.
Still another object of the patent is to provide user-and-earwear interaction/feedback based on the user and environment understanding if necessary. A camera mounted on the earwear may have a limited field-of-view. Therefore, it is possible to effectively capture images by configuring the sensor to capture the image such that the captured image does not overlap another image captured by another ear-wearing type electronic device. More specifically, the ear-wearing type electronic device may interact with the user by alerting them when there’s a nearby car detected by a computer vision task.
