SVM-based Drone Sound Recognition using the Combination of HLA and WPT Techniques in Practical Noisy Environment

In recent years, the development of drone technologies has promoted the widespread commercial application of drones. However, the ability of drone to carry explosives and other destructive materials may bring serious threats to public safety. In order to reduce these threats from illegal drones, acoustic feature extraction and classification technologies are introduced for drone sound identification. In this paper, we introduce the acoustic feature vector extraction method of harmonic line association (HLA), and subband power feature extraction based on wavelet packet transform (WPT). We propose a feature vector extraction method based on combined HLA and WPT to extract more sophisticated characteristics of sound. Moreover, to identify drone sounds, support vector machine (SVM) classification with the optimized parameter by genetic algorithm (GA) is employed based on the extracted feature vector. Four drones' sounds and other kinds of sounds existing in outdoor environment are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that with the proposed method, identification probability can achieve up to 100 % in trials, and robustness against noise is also significantly improved.