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Acoustic Source Fusion-Based Passive Eavesdropping System Using Millimeter-Wave Radar

  • Minjun Jiang
  • , Zhijun Li*
  • , Guodong Liu
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Soochow University
  • Nanjing University

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Indoor speech propagation causes minute vibrations in surrounding objects, enabling remote speech recovery through passive eavesdropping. Unlike traditional methods that rely on acoustic waves, passive eavesdropping uses object vibrations, making it difficult to defend against, even in soundproof environments. However, weak vibration signals and noise interference make speech recovery challenging. Existing studies mainly focus on deep learning for signal reconstruction, requiring large datasets and high computational power, which complicates real-time, on-device deployment. To address this, we propose a lightweight passive speech recovery system based on millimeter-wave radar. Without prior knowledge of object locations or numbers, the system can adaptively fuse multi-source signals for real-time speech reconstruction. To counteract the noise characteristics of millimeter-wave radar and the weak amplitude of vibration signals, we designed a set of low-complexity noise suppression and signal enhancement algorithms, ensuring efficient operation on edge devices. Experimental results demonstrate that in single-target scenarios, the proposed system achieved a Mel Cepstral Distortion (MCD) of 3.923 and a Word Error Rate (WER) of 12.9%. In multi-target scenarios, the SNR improved by 3.65 dB, MCD decreased by an average of 1.52, and WER decreased by an average of 15.83%, making the method effective and practical in complex acoustic environments.

Original languageEnglish
Article number4009
JournalApplied Sciences (Switzerland)
Volume16
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2026
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • denoising
  • eavesdropping
  • millimeter wave
  • passive eavesdropping
  • speech reconstruction

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