e-Door

The e-Door project originates from the collaboration of six companies located in the Marche region: It-Works Srl, Leaff Engineering Srl, Proietti Planet Srl, Western Co. Snc, Curvet Engineering Srl and Restart Scarl. Tecnomarche and Università Politecnica delle Marche, A3Lab group acted as consultants to research and develop on specific aspects of the project.

The main objective of e-Door was to study and develop a smart access control system. The system was thought to be installed in homes or in piers, and to be integrated with existing home/building automation systems. The e-Door system consisted of an external and an internal unit. The external unit was composed of an embedded PC, an LCD display, four microphones, a loudspeaker and smart card reader. Power supply was assured by solar panels, so making e-Door an environmentally friendly system.

The internal unit was installed inside the building, in a PC platform. The developed software was integrated in existing operating systems with media center capabilities. e-Door use cases are as follows:
  • smart entry phone: an audio/video communication between the internal and the external unit is established when a person "rings" at the external unit;
  • smart access: a person wants to access to the building using his/her voice.
The external unit could be installed on noisy environments, such as near roads, piers or halls of hotels, so a low quality voice could be transmitted and recognition accuracy could be compromised. This motivated A3Lab to develop advanced multichannel noise reduction algorithms. Communication between external and internal unit also required the development of acoustic echo cancelation algorithms so that sufficient speech intellegibility was guaranteed. Finally, A3Lab developed the speaker recognition modules that allowed the authentication of a person's identity by voice. The recognition process consisted of two sessions:
  • enrollment: the person was asked to say four sequences of six digits. At the end of the process, a voiceprint is created and stored in a smart card.
  • verification: the person who wants to access to the building/yacht inserts his/her smart card in the reader (so claiming his/her identity), and then is asked to say a sequence of digits visualized in the LCD display. If the identity is confirmed, the access is granted, otherwise is denied.