Single-Mode Wild Area Surveillance Sensor With Ultra-Low Power Design Based on Microphone Array

Acoustic sensors are used as an important sensor component in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for wild environmental monitoring, because of its small size, light weight, and low power consumption. To further utilize the superiorities of acoustic sensor, this paper aims to design a single-mode wild area surveillance sensor based on acoustic sensors, which have the advantages of practicality, low hardware power consumption, and low software complexity. The proposed algorithm can effectively suppress wind noise and improve the performance of target detection, classification and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. The power consumption test results show that the designed micro-sensor node has low power consumption of about 13.8 mW in on-duty mode and long-term continuous monitoring capability of about 33 days. The field experiment results reveal that the node has favorable performance in detection (detection rate as high as 96% with false alarm rate under 5%), tracking (error is less than 7.6 degree), and target classification (accuracy is greater than 92.6%).