Sky-Ear: An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Enabled Victim Sound Detection and Localization System
arXiv:2604.12455
The paper presents Sky-Ear, a UAV-mounted system that uses a circular microphone array and a two-stage audio processing pipeline to detect and locate victim sounds efficiently during search‑and‑rescue missions.
Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in search-and-rescue (SAR) missions, yet continuous and reliable victim detection and localization remain challenging due to on-board hardware constraints. This paper designs an UAV-Enabled Victim Sound Detection and Localization System (called ``Sky-Ear'' for brevity) to achieve energy-efficient acoustic sensing and sound detection for SAR. Sky-Ear enables the ``ear'' of the UAV with a circular-shaped microphone array, and the array conducts continuous audio recordings during the UAV's flight. In Sky-Ear, a two-stage (Sentinel and Responder) audio processing method is developed for energy-consuming and highly reliable sound detection. In the Sentinel stage, a Masking autoencoder (MAE)-based sound detection mechanism is designed to analyze frequency-time acoustic features. For improved precision, a continuous localization method is designed by optimizing detected directions from multiple observations. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to validate the system's performance in terms of victim detection accuracy and localization error.