Structure Assisted Spectrum Sensing for Low-power Acoustic Event Detection

Abstract

Acoustic sensing has conventionally been dependent on highfrequency sampling of analog signals and frequency domain analysis in digital domain which is power-hungry. While these techniques work well for regular devices, low-power acoustic sensors demand for an alternative approach. In this work, we propose Lyra, a novel low-power acoustic sensing architecture that employs carefully designed passive structures to filter incoming sound waves and extract their frequency components. We eliminate power-hungry components such as ADC and digital FFT operations and instead propose to use low-power analog circuitry to process the signals. Lyra aims to provide a low-power platform for a range of maintenance-free acoustic event monitoring and ambient computing applications.