Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: Pressure sensors are widely integrated into modern Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. As they are sensitive to acoustic pressure, they can be a source of eavesdropping. We introduce HVAC-EAR, which reconstructs intelligible speech from low-resolution, noisy pressure data with two key contributions: (i) We achieve intelligible reconstruction from as low as 0.5 kHz sampling rate, surpassing prior work limited to hot word detection, by employing a complex-valued conformer with a Complex Unifed Attention Block to capture phoneme dependencies; (ii) We mitigate transient HVAC noise by reconstructing both magnitude and phase of missing frequencies. For the first time, evaluations on real-world HVAC deployments show significant intelligibility up to 1.2 m distance, raising novel privacy concerns.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Tamiti, Tarikul Islam, Joshi, Biraj, Hasan, Rida, Barua, Anomadarshi
Institution: George Mason University
Language: English
Topic: Speech and Audio Processing
Subfield: Signal Processing
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7084447024
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