IoT for Defense and National Security

10AI Enabled Processing of Environmental Sounds in Commercial and Defense Environments

David Wood¹, Jae‐wook Ahn¹, Seraphin Calo¹, Nancy Greco¹, Keith Grueneberg¹, Tadanobu Inoue², Dinesh Verma¹, and Shiqiang Wang¹

¹IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

²IBM Research, IBM Japan, Chuo‐ku, Tokyo, Japan

Abstract

Ambient sounds provide a wealth of information which can be useful in many IoT solutions in commercial and defense use cases. The application of AI based techniques to traditional acoustic signal processing can provide many interesting use cases which include a diverse set such as detecting faults in industrial manufacturing, identifying possible illnesses in chicken farms, efficient process management of naval facility equipment, and detecting possible intruders at borders. The use of AI provides an augmented capability for a data driven understanding of the environment, but also comes with several challenges. AI models need to operate in environments which may be different from the environment within which they are trained. Effective use of AI models in acoustics requires technologies that can enable these models to retrain themselves, or adapt themselves dynamically within the deployed environment. In this chapter, a system for deploying AI based acoustic models in real‐world environments, and lessons learned from them is described.

10.1 Introduction

Acoustic data can provide insights concerning what is happening in a particular environment ...