Lightweight Acoustic Detection of Logging in Wireless Sensor Networks
László Czúni and Péter Zoltán Varga
Image Processing Laboratory, Dep. of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems
University of Pannonia, Veszprém 8200, Egyetem u. 10.
czuni@almos.vein.hu
ABSTRACT
In our paper we investigate methods to detect the
acoustic signals of logging with the help of lightweight
sensors in a wireless sensor network. The main
advantage of using such sensors is their small size, low
cost, low power consumption, rare and cheap
maintenance, and reasonable detection performance.
These properties make such acoustic sensors
competitive to video based systems in large area
surveillance.
Besides specifying the hardware platform and the used
test databases we detail the signal processing methods
for acoustic feature detection and classification and
also discuss the performance of single node and multi
sensors information fusion.
KEYWORDS
Acoustic signal processing, logging detection,
chainsaw detection, autocorrelation, feature detection,
classification, large area surveillance, wireless sensor
network
1 INTRODUCTION
The surveillance of large territories of woods is
important from several aspects: the detection of illegal
logging, fires, illegal vehicle traffic can prevent great
losses if the proper action can be done in time.
There are different approaches to monitor large open
areas such as satellite image processing [1], [2], local
video surveillance [3], [4] or wireless sensor networks
(WSNs) [5], [6].
The state of the art of satellite signal based methods
does not support real-time operation in general, and
also the spatial resolution is very limited.
Unfortunately, conventional video surveillance suffers
from several shortcomings: if the viewing angle of the
ISBN:978-0-9891305-6-1 ©2014 SDIWC
lens is wide then the resolution is low, otherwise the
monitored area is too small; the analysis of data
requires high complexity solutions; the required
bandwidth of image transfer and the energy
consumption of such devices is relatively large.
In our paper we focus on the detection of illegal
logging based on the detection of the acoustic signals
of the chainsaws. The constraints of this application
area are similar to the above mentioned. Due to the
nature of logging with chainsaw the use of acoustic
sensors seems to be an optimal solution. In our article,
after overviewing some similar approaches, we
introduce a low cost and lightweight sensor platform,
detail the proposed signal processing and feature
classification methods, and discuss their performance.
2 OVERVIEW OF RELATED WORKS
The usage of acoustic devices for surveillance can be
found in several application areas. In [7] authors report
an acoustic surveillance experiment where the
proposed system, comprised of a computer and a
microphone situated in a typical office environment,
continuously analyzes the acoustic activity at the site,
separates all interesting events, and stores them in a
database.
In [8] examples for real-time acoustic classification of
vehicles into two sets (cars and trucks) are proposed.
Different classifiers were tested in the spectral and
cepstral domain. Best results, on a certain database,
could reach 97% with the usage of neural networks.
While there are several papers for the acoustic
classification of vehicles we found not much
information regarding the possibilities for chainsaw
detection. The most valuable information was found in
[9] where a wireless sensor network for chainsaw
detection is described. Authors took into consideration
the limitations of the hardware platform when
designing an autocorrelation based detection
mechanism. Detection is based on checking the
fundamental frequency, sound intensity, and the
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 number of local maximums of the autocorrelation
function. The best detection correctness was 80%,
unfortunately neither the exact classification method
nor the experimental setup or the test database is
described in details.
We can conclude that while the area of acoustic signal
processing is very large, the detection of chainsaw, an
important event in forest surveillance, is not analyzed
deeply. Moreover, most papers don’t consider the
limited hardware resources and energy supply
available in WSNs. Contrary, in our paper we report
the algorithms (and their performance) implemented in
low consumption sensors including information fusion.
3 CHAINSAW DETECTION IN A
WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK
First we introduce the available hardware platform for
sensing and data processing defining the limitations in
memory, computing power, and power supply. Then
the test databases, used in the evaluation of the
proposed detection mechanism, are described. Later
the signal processing and classification methods are
detailed with the possibilities to use a single node or
several nodes applying information fusion.
3.1 Hardware platform of nodes
The WSN consists of nodes, equipped with electret
microphones, responsible for recording and processing
small audio segments (see Figure 1). Closely placed
base stations are responsible for forwarding high level
information from the nodes to a remote back-end
computer via GPRS or fusing information of the slave
nodes. The communication between the nodes and the
base station is achieved at 868MHz within a range of
300 meters at a maximum bit-rate of 1000kb/s. Node
side information processing and data transmission is
done with an ATMega128RFA1 combined
microcontroller-radio chip programmed in nesC, using
the TinyOS operating system. This 8 bit architecture is
equipped with 16KB SRAM and 2MB Flash memory.
The node is supplied with two AA type 2600mAh
batteries. The advantage of this lightweight setup is
low power consumption (long operation time) and low
cost while it makes difficult to implement sophisticated
data processing algorithms.
ISBN:978-0-9891305-6-1 ©2014 SDIWC
Figure 1. The applied wireless node with acoustic sensor
board and antenna
3.2 Preprocessing
While the hardware platform enables us of high
frequency sampling, due to the acoustic nature of the
chainsaw and the limitations of available SRAM, it is
satisfactory to apply 8333Hz 10 bit sampling as the
lowest built in option of the node. As we will see, this
is still high for the proposed feature detection.
Therefore we apply a down-sampling to one fourth
preceded by FIR low pass filtering. This saves memory
and decreases the computational complexity of further
processing.
We implemented an autogain mechanism to set the
amplitude of the signal making it possible to detect
chainsaw from a few meters to more than 50 meters
distance from the node. A fast autogain mechanism is
achieved, with the two cascaded amplifiers of the node,
considering only the peaks of the incoming signal
avoiding signal overflow and too low signal energies.
The available SRAM of the node enables us to store
and evaluate only 4 consecutive acoustic samples of
1/8 sec length for the detection of logging at a time.
3.3 Test databases
We built two test beds for the testing of the different
algorithms.
The Single Source Database (SSDB) contains
chainsaw samples, recorded within a range of 5-60
meters from the chainsaw at 53-84dB sound level, and
open-air city noises such a wind, remote vehicle traffic,
talking, bird sounds and other effects at around 42dB
noise level. SSDB contains 570 samples (each segment
is of 1/8 sec length) with 60% chainsaw and 40%
background noise. SSDB is used in training and testing
for single sensor detection.
The Half-Synthetic Database (HSDB) is composed of
forest chainsaw recordings as positive samples (154
short segments) and different negative samples
(rainfall, wind, bird sounds, remote traffic, cricket
chirps) from various internet resources (1000
segments). The positive chainsaw samples were
manipulated by adding noise effects to simulate as the
samples were recorded from the same chainsaw but at
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 different distances at different signal-to-noise ratio. In simpler FFT such as in [10] but the application of such
future we plan to substitute this later database with real techniques are above the limitations of our research.)
synchronized multi-sensor recordings but at the current The general form of the autocorrelation function of the
state of the work the HSDB was used to test multi input signal 𝑠 is calculated as:
∞
sensor fusion. In our tests less than 50% percent of
samples were used for training the remaining for 𝑅 𝑚 = 𝑠𝑛 ⋅ 𝑠𝑛+𝑚 (1)
testing the classification methods. n=−∞
while in our case:
s
3.4 Feature extraction
As discussed in [9] the different chainsaw engines have 𝑅 𝑚 = (𝑠𝑛 − 𝑠) ⋅ 𝑠 𝑛+𝑚 𝑚𝑜𝑑 𝑠 −𝑠 (2)
a baseline frequency somewhere between 100 and 300 n=0
Hz depending on the type and rev of the engine. While where 𝑠𝑛 is the nth input signal, 𝑠 is its mean and
other acoustic sources can have similar properties the s = 256 is the length of the input vector. Figure 4.
distribution of peaks of the Fourier spectra is quite illustrates the autocorrelation function of signals of
different and it can also vary greatly in their case. Just Figure 2. As can be seen for the chainsaw the shape of
for illustration we show the time signal and the Fourier 𝑅 𝑚 is quite regular with a long series of high peaks.
Transformation (FT) of a chainsaw sample and of a
wind acoustic sample in Figure 2. and Figure 3.

Figure 4. The autocorrelation of the chainsaw (left) and wind

Figure 2. The typical signal shape of chainsaw (left) and
wind (right).
(right) samples of Figure 2.
After finding the local maximum, with a gradient
search method, in the autocorrelation function we
calculate the following descriptors:

 Average distance of the local maxima 𝑚𝑎𝑥𝑖 :

1 |𝑚𝑎𝑥 |
𝑎𝑣𝑔𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑡 = |𝑚𝑎𝑥 | 𝑖=1 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖 (3)

where max is the set of local maximum, and

𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖 = 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑚𝑎𝑥𝑖 − 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛(𝑚𝑎𝑥𝑖−1 )
Figure 3. The FT in the 0-1000Hz range of the time signals  Variance of distances of local maximum:
of Figure 2. Chainsaw (left) and wind (right). |𝑚𝑎𝑥 |
1 2
𝑣𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 = 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖 − 𝑎𝑣𝑔𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑡 (4)
Peaks of the Fourier spectrum could be considered for |𝑚𝑎𝑥|
feature extraction; however the application of Fast 𝑖=1
Fourier Transformation (FFT) is still above the  The number of local maximum:
capabilities of the node’s processor. Instead of using
FFT (with a complexity of n x log n) we calculate the |𝑚𝑎𝑥|
autocorrelation (with complexity n x n). At first sight it  The short time energy of the input signal:
seems to be unreasonable to choose the method with
|S|
higher theoretical complexity but the limitation of the
node’s architecture (8 bit integers and 16KB SRAM) STE = 𝑠𝑛2 , n ∈ N (5)
and the requirements of the sampling of the sinusoidal n=0
signals and the handling of the complex values makes
it unfeasible to compute the FFT on our platform.
(Here we mention that there are possibilities for

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 3.5 Classification based on a single node
Memory limitations of the node allow the recording of
4 pieces of samples with 1/8 sec duration each. The
feature extraction and classification of these 4 samples
takes 3 seconds.
For the sake of lightweight classification we tested
different decision trees first, namely Alternating
Decision Tree (ADT) [11], Best-First decision tree
[12], Decision Stump [13], J48 (C4.5) [14], J48Graft
(grafted C4.5) [15], LogitBoost Alternating Decision
Tree (LADTree) [11], Random Forest [17], Random
Tree [13], Reduced-Error Pruning Tree [13], Simple
Classification and Regression Tree (CART) [18].
While decision trees can be considered as generally
good classifiers in pattern recognition, their main
advantage is the simple and cost efficient
implementation considering speed and memory usage.
90,00
80,00
70,00
60,00
50,00
Figure 5. The hitrate (in %) of different decision trees based
on single samples of the SSDB.
Figure 5. compares the hitrate (true positive rate) of the
different tree-based classifiers evaluated on the SSDB.
While a few is above 80% we should also consider the
false positives to get a better picture of these methods.
It is important to have a picture of false positive
detections since in a real surveillance system the false
alarms can cause extra costs due to the implied labor
demanding local monitoring. Since logging takes a
relatively long time the rate of false negatives, based
on a single measurement, is not so dangerous. Figure 6.
shows the hitrate divided by the number of false
positives.
ISBN:978-0-9891305-6-1 ©2014 SDIWC
50
40
30
20
10
0
Figure 6. The hitrate (in %) normalized by false positive
detections of different decision trees based on single samples
of the SSDB.
As Figure 6. shows ADT gives the best performance if
the rate of false positive decisions is also considered.
ADT is a decision tree built with the help of a boosting
mechanism using several weak classifiers [11]. The
output of this binary classifier is a real number in a
range of 0 and 100. Binary classification is achieved by
thresholding this number, as default 50 is set to make
the decision. The average hitrate of ADT on SSDB is
84.9% giving 2% average false positive and 13%
average false negative rates. The confusion matrix of
ADT is given in Table 1.
Table 1. The confusion matrix (in %) of ADT based on
single samples of the SSDB.
Decision
Ground truth Chainsaw Other
Chainsaw 76.19 23.81
Other 2.67 97.33
There are several possibilities to consider several
samples of a given node. After testing different
approaches we just give the best three methods all
using 4 consecutive samples:
 Averaging the features of 4 samples and applying
ADT for classification (4sADT).
 Averaging the features of 4 samples and applying
SVM [19] for classification (4sSVM).
 Averaging the output (in 0-100 range) of the 4
ADT single classifiers. The average value is then
thresholded to make the final decision
(4sADTAVR).
The results of these methods can be found in Table 2.
where the threshold for 4sADTAVR is set to 42.
Figure 7. shows the ROC (Receiver Operating Curve)
of the 4sADTAVR approach with different thresholds.
In general we can say that the application of
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 consecutive samples could give only a moderate gain
over single sample decisions. Table 3. The confusion matrix (in %) of kNN based on
samples of the HSDB.
Decision
Table 2. The confusion matrix (in %) of different methods
Ground truth Chainsaw Other
using the data of a single node. The 4sADTAVR used 42 as
threshold. Chainsaw 97.06% 2.94%
Decision Other 2.25% 97.75%
Single sample 4 samples 4 samples 4 samples ADT
ADT ADT SVM averaging
Ground
truth Chains. Other Chains. Other Chains. Other Chains. Other 4. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
Chains. 76.19 23.81 69.01 30.99 78.87 21.13 77.46 21.13
In our article we investigated the problem of chainsaw
Other 2.67 97.33 6.25 93.75 6.25 93.75 2.08 97.92
detection with lightweight sensors in a WSN. The main
constraints of the tasks are the limited processing
power, memory, communication bandwidth, and power
supply of the components of the WSN. We proposed
the analysis of some features of the autocorrelation
function of the recorded acoustic signals with the help
of decision trees, SVM, and kNN. We used real data
for the evaluations of the different approaches. The
best hitrate for a single sensor was 84.9% and 97.7%
for the fusion of three sensors. For testing sensor
fusion half-synthetic data were used.
Based on our initial tests (under 20 degree Celsius
temperature) with single sensors we found if 33% of
the time is monitored then the energy supply of the two
AA batteries keeps for approximately 42 days. If only
every 20th second (5% of total time) is recorded and
analyzed then the batteries last for about 300 days.
Taking into consideration the nature of logging these
Figure 7. The ROC of the 4sADTAVR approach with
different thresholds. If the false positive detection is around values seem to be reasonable in a forest surveillance
zero than the true positive detection is around 50%. application.
In future we plan to set up the WSN in forests under
3.6 Using multiple sensors different environmental circumstances and run long-
The advantage of the single sensor multiple samples term performance tests.
approach is that we need no overlapping of the sensible
areas thus we can achieve the maximum coverage of
the area under surveillance. Unfortunately we could 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
not exceed 77.46/2.08 true positive/false positive ratio.
Using the HSDB set we could test multiple sensors This research was supported by the Hungarian
fusion. In this setup we calculated the weighted sum of Government and the European Union and co-financed
the measured features and also added variables to by the European Social Fund under projects
represent the variance of each feature coming from the GOP-1.1.1-11-2011-0070 and TÁMOP-4.2.2.C-
different sensors. 11/1/KONV-2012-0004. László Czúni was supported
For classification we also tested decision trees and by the Bolyai scholarship of the Hungarian Academy
SVM but in this case the kNN (k=15) classifier [20] of Sciences. Special thanks for the help of Péter József
gave the best results. For confusion matrix see Table Kiss, Gergely Vakulya and Gyula Simon.
3., the average hitrate is 97.7%. This fusion can be
easily computed by the base stations based on the
synchronization of the slave nodes.

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