Acoustic Activity Recognition

The use of microphones and machine learning to automatically identify and classify sounds occurring in an environment, such as doorbells, alarms, appliances, speech, and other everyday acoustic events. Acoustic activity recognition is particularly relevant to accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing people, as it can power notification systems that alert users to important sounds they cannot hear. Unlike visual sensing, acoustic sensing is not susceptible to occlusion and can work around corners and through walls, making it practical for whole-home awareness. Modern approaches use deep learning on audio spectrograms to achieve high classification accuracy across diverse environments.