Acoustic Detection and Verification of Intrusions against Military Facilities

Current surveillance systems often use mounted cameras to capture video imagery and a range of sophisticated sensors and stand-alone security devices. These current surveillance systems are often point solutions based on a centralized architecture for surveillance applications. Point solution systems use a single control agent to coordinate the actions of the independent sensors. The manpower needed to monitor these systems is exorbitant, requiring expensive camera systems and personnel to weed out false alarms. In response to these needs, Williams-Pyro, Inc., proposes to develop an autonomous exterior sensor system triggered exclusively by speech or vehicle noise, for alerting security personnel of possible break-in or trespass in military facilities. This network of portable, distributed, intrusion detection sensors discriminates between acoustic sources of interest (speech, vehicle noise) and background noise. When a valid target is detected a sound snippet is sent to security personnel for verification, eliminating the need for costly camera systems. Additionally the system will use acoustic arrays capable of determining a bearing to the target, which will be used by higher level processing to determine the target’s location. This capability can also be used to disregard false alarms from unrestricted or noisy areas.