Tracking drones by sound

Topic: Tracking drones by sound

When: 22 April 12.00 to 13.00

Where: Online

Speaker: Magnus Oskarsson, Mathematical Imaging Group, Lund University

Spoken language: English

Abstract

In this talk, we present a system for drone detection and positioning, based on the inherent drone sound. The detection system is built around an audio detection rig with a set of microphones.  We show that we can use so-called direction-of-arrival methods to efficiently position a drone from its ambient emitted sound only, up to several hundred meters distance. The audio system is tested in a real setting, using several different drones, in a number of real flight experiments, with promising results. The work has included recording a dataset,  with audio and ground truth positions of the drones, and we have released both the code and the dataset for public use.

Although the focus of the current work is the audio detection and positioning system, we have built the system in an efficient and modular way, so that it can work with a number of parallel sensing modules. The full system would additionally be composed of a set of fixed cameras with a large combined field of view and a Pan-Tilt-Zoom camera, and future work includes how to combine the audio processing with the vision system.