Machine Learning Inspired Sound-Based Amateur Drone Detection for Public Safety Applications

In recent years, popularity of unmanned air vehicles enormously increased due to their autonomous moving capability and applications in various domains. This also results in some serious security threats, that needs proper investigation and timely detection of the amateur drones (ADr) to protect the security sensitive institutions. In this paper, we propose the novel machine learning (ML) framework for detection and classification of ADr sounds out of the various sounds like bird, airplanes, and thunderstorm in the noisy environment. To extract the necessary features from ADr sound, Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), and linear predictive cepstral coefficients (LPCC) feature extraction techniques are implemented. After feature extraction, support vector machines (SVM) with various kernels are adopted to accurately classify these sounds. The experimental results verify that SVM cubic kernel with MFCC outperform LPCC method by achieving around 96.7% accuracy for ADr detection. Moreover, the results verified that the proposed ML scheme has more than 17% detection accuracy, compared with correlation-based drone sound detection scheme that ignores ML prediction.