RadioMic: Sound Sensing via mmWave Signals

TL;DR

RadioMic introduces a radio-based sound sensing system using mmWave signals that overcomes microphone limitations, enabling sound detection through walls and enhancing sound quality with neural networks, thus expanding the potential of mmWave sensing devices.

Contribution

RadioMic presents a novel radio acoustics approach for sound sensing that operates through walls and employs training-free detection with neural network enhancement, reducing reliance on RF data.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art sound sensing systems

Works through walls, including soundproof barriers

Provides high-fidelity sound recovery with neural network enhancement

Abstract

Voice interfaces has become an integral part of our lives, with the proliferation of smart devices. Today, IoT devices mainly rely on microphones to sense sound. Microphones, however, have fundamental limitations, such as weak source separation, limited range in the presence of acoustic insulation, and being prone to multiple side-channel attacks. In this paper, we propose RadioMic, a radio-based sound sensing system to mitigate these issues and enrich sound applications. RadioMic constructs sound based on tiny vibrations on active sources (e.g., a speaker or human throat) or object surfaces (e.g., paper bag), and can work through walls, even a soundproof one. To convert the extremely weak sound vibration in the radio signals into sound signals, RadioMic introduces radio acoustics, and presents training-free approaches for robust sound detection and high-fidelity sound recovery. It then exploits a neural network to further enhance the recovered sound by expanding the recoverable frequencies and reducing the noises. RadioMic translates massive online audios to synthesized data to train the network, and thus minimizes the need of RF data. We thoroughly evaluate RadioMic under different scenarios using a commodity mmWave radar. The results show RadioMic outperforms the state-of-the-art systems significantly. We believe RadioMic provides new horizons for sound sensing and inspires attractive sensing capabilities of mmWave sensing devices