Compressed sensing based acoustic event detection in protected area networks with wireless multimedia sensors

Wireless multimedia sensors have been frequently used for detecting events in acoustic rich environments such as protected area networks. Such areas have diverse habitat, frequently varying terrain and are a source of very large number of acoustic events. This work is aimed at detecting the tree cutting event in a forest area, by identifying the acoustic pattern generated due to an axe hitting a tree bole, with the help of wireless multimedia sensors. A series of operations using the hamming window, wiener filter, Otsu thresholding and mathematical morphology are used for removing the unwanted clutter from the spectrogram obtained from such events. Using the sparse nature of the acoustic signals, a compressed sensing based energy efficient data gathering scheme is devised for accurate event reporting. A network of Mica2 motes is deployed in a real forest area to test the validity of the proposed scheme. Analytical and experimental results proves the efficacy of the proposed event detection scheme.