Ubiquitous Acoustic Sensing on Commodity IoT Devices: A Survey

Abstract

With the proliferation of Internet-of-Things devices, acoustic sensing attracts much attention in recent years. It exploits acoustic transceivers such as microphones and speakers beyond their primary functions, namely recording and playing, to enable novel applications and new user experiences. In this paper, we present the first systematic survey of recent advances in active acoustic sensing using commodity hardware with a frequency range below 24~\!kHz. We propose a general framework that categorizes main building blocks of acoustic sensing systems. This framework encompasses three layers, i.e., physical layer, core technique layer, and application layer. The physical layer includes basic hardware components, acoustic platforms as well as the air-borne and structure-borne channel characteristics. The core technique layer encompasses key mechanisms to generate acoustic signals (waveforms) and to extract useful temporal, spatial and spectral information from received signals. The application layer builds upon the functions offered by the core techniques to realize different acoustic sensing applications. We highlight unique challenges due to the limitations of physical devices and acoustic channels and how they are mitigated or overcame by core processing techniques and application-specific solutions. Finally, research opportunities and future directions are discussed to spawn further in-depth investigation on acoustic sensing.