B4W: A Smart Wireless Intruder Detection System

Abstract

Surveillance and monitoring are highly critical in many application scenarios like wildlife conservation, restricted areas such as nuclear spillover, and border security. Moreover, in these scenarios, intrusions do not happen frequently thus, conventional surveillance is overkill and expensive that also requires extensive human involvement which can be arduous, expensive, and inefficient. To address these issues we propose an end-to-end smart acoustic surveillance solution for intrusion detection using a simple low-cost system called Balls for Walls (B4 W). The objective is to create a network of sensors that could also be remotely launched. The nodes responsible for surveillance employ audio sensors which are packaged within hard balls thus allowing the launch of these sensors from a distance of over 500 m. We use microphones for detecting human activity inferred through sensing the sound of footsteps against background noise. We evaluate the systems across five different terrain types. We propose a novel, low complexity detection algorithm called SEED which leverages signal energy and shape to distinguish humans from ambient noise. B4 W offers a maximum detection rate of 98.3% on dry leaves and a low false alarm rate of 0.9%. The system is energy efficient to last a maximum of 170 days and it is orientation agnostic. The proposed system has been extensively tested across varying terrains and ambient signal scenarios to demonstrate its efficacy.