journal article·2026-04-20Open access

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

Minjun Jiang, Zhijun Li, Guodong Liu

Applied Sciences· Volume 16· Issue 8

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.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Speech and Audio Processing · Sparse and Compressive Sensing Techniques · Non-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

School of Future Science and Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China

School of Computer Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210089, China

References (45)

Show source-provided references
1. The visual microphone: Passive recovery of sound from video10.1145/2601097.2601119 ↗
2. Laser microphone10.1121/1.391370 ↗
3. Wang, G., Zou, Y., Zhou, Z., Wu, K., and Ni, L.M. (2014). We can hear you with Wi-Fi!. Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Association for Computing Machinery.10.1145/2639108.2639112 ↗
4. Wei, T., Wang, S., Zhou, A., and Zhang, X. (2015). Acoustic eavesdropping through wireless vibrometry. Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Association for Computing Machinery.10.1145/2789168.2790119 ↗
5. Hu, P., Ma, Y., Santhalingam, P.S., Pathak, P.H., and Cheng, X. (2022). Milliear: Millimeter-wave acoustic eavesdropping with unconstrained vocabulary. IEEE INFOCOM 2022—IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, IEEE.10.1109/INFOCOM48880.2022.9796940 ↗
6. Feng, Y., Zhang, K., Wang, C., Xie, L., Ning, J., and Chen, S. (2023). mmeavesdropper: Signal augmentation-based directional eavesdropping with mmwave radar. IEEE INFOCOM 2023—IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, IEEE.10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10229095 ↗
7. Learning-based Practical Smartphone Eavesdropping with Built-in Accelerometer
8. Anand, S.A., and Saxena, N. (2018). Speechless: Analyzing the threat to speech privacy from smartphone motion sensors. 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), IEEE.10.1109/SP.2018.00004 ↗
9. Zhang, L., Pathak, P.H., Wu, M., Zhao, Y., and Mohapatra, P. (2015). Accelword: Energy efficient hotword detection through accelerometer. Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, Association for Computing Machinery.10.1145/2742647.2742658 ↗
10. Michalevsky, Y., Boneh, D., and Nakibly, G. (2014, January 20–22). Gyrophone: Recognizing speech from gyroscope signals. Proceedings of the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 14), San Diego, CA, USA. Available online: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity14/technical-sessions/presentation/michalevsky.
11. Hu, P., Zhuang, H., Santhalingam, P.S., Spolaor, R., Pathak, P., Zhang, G., and Cheng, X. (2022). Accear: Accelerometer acoustic eavesdropping with unconstrained vocabulary. 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), IEEE.10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833716 ↗
12. Adler, A., Alvarez-Melis, D., and Tasnim, S. (2015). WiMic: Recovering Sound with Wireless Signals, MIT CSAIL.
13. Chen, Y., Yu, J., Chen, Y., Kong, L., Zhu, Y., and Chen, Y.-C. (2024). RFSpy: Eavesdropping on online conversations with out-of-vocabulary words by sensing metal coil vibration of headsets leveraging RFID. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Association for Computing Machinery.10.1145/3643832.3661887 ↗
14. Basak, S., Padarthi, A., and Gowda, M. (2025). mmWave-Whisper: Phone Call Eavesdropping and Transcription Using Millimeter-Wave Radar. ICASSP 2025–2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), IEEE.10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10890670 ↗
15. Xu, X., Chen, Y., Ling, Z., Lu, L., Luo, J., and Fu, X. (2024). mmEar: Push the limit of COTS mmWave eavesdropping on headphones. IEEE INFOCOM 2024—IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, IEEE.10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621229 ↗
16. mmHSE: Enhanced Eavesdropping Attack on Headsets Leveraging COTS mmWave Radar
17. Hu, P., Li, W., Spolaor, R., and Cheng, X. (2023, January 21–25). mmecho: A mmwave-based acoustic eavesdropping method. Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), San Francisco, CA, USA.10.1109/SP46215.2023.10179484 ↗
18. We Can Hear You with mmWave Radar! An End-to-End Eavesdropping System
19. Wang, S., and Zhang, X. (2024). A Vibration Signal Enhancement Scheme for mmWave-Based Sound Eavesdropping. IEEE INFOCOM 2024-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS), IEEE.10.1109/INFOCOMWKSHPS61880.2024.10620704 ↗
20. Acoustic Eavesdropping from Sound-Induced Vibrations with Multi-Antenna mmWave Radar10.1109/TMC.2025.3551317 ↗
21. Thomson, W. (2018). Theory of Vibration with Applications, CRC Press.10.1201/9780203718841 ↗
22. An efficient frequency and phase estimation algorithm with CRB performance for FMCW radar applications10.1109/TIM.2014.2381354 ↗
23. High-resolution frequency-wavenumber spectrum analysis10.1109/PROC.1969.7278 ↗
24. A CFAR adaptive matched filter detector10.1109/7.135446 ↗
25. ST-DBSCAN: An algorithm for clustering spatial–temporal data10.1016/j.datak.2006.01.013 ↗
26. Communication in the presence of noise10.1109/JRPROC.1949.232969 ↗
27. Alessio, S.M. (2015). IIR Filter Design. Digital Signal Processing and Spectral Analysis for Scientists: Concepts and Applications, Springer International Publishing.10.1007/978-3-319-25468-5_8 ↗
28. Gouyon, F., Pachet, F., and Delerue, O. (2000, January 7–9). On the use of zero-crossing rate for an application of classification of percussive sounds. Proceedings of the COST G-6 Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFX-00), Verona, Italy. Available online: http://193.166.3.2/pub/sci/audio/dafx/2000/profs.sci.univr.it/%257Edafx/Final-Papers/pdf/GouyonPachetDelerue.pdf.
29. A modified BFGS algorithm for unconstrained optimization10.1093/imanum/11.3.325 ↗
30. Sainburg, T., Thielk, M., and Gentner, T.Q. (2020). Finding, visualizing, and quantifying latent structure across diverse animal vocal repertoires. PLoS Comput. Biol., 16.10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008228 ↗
31. Richter, J., Wu, Y.-C., Krenn, S., Welker, S., Lay, B., Watanabe, S., Richard, A., and Gerkmann, T. (2024). EARS An anechoic fullband speech dataset benchmarked for speech enhancement and dereverberation. arXiv.10.21437/Interspeech.2024-153 ↗
32. Kominek, J., Schultz, T., and Black, A.W. (2008). Synthesizer voice quality of new languages calibrated with mean mel cepstral distortion. SLTU, Carnegie Mellon University. Available online: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/papers/sltu2008/kominek_black.sltu_2008.pdf.
33. Feature extraction using MFCC
34. Wang, Y.Y., Acero, A., and Chelba, C. (2003). Is word error rate a good indicator for spoken language understanding accuracy. 2003 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (IEEE Cat.No.03EX721), IEEE.10.1109/ASRU.2003.1318504 ↗
35. Robust speech recognition via large-scale weak supervision. International conference on machine learning
36. Fan, B., Song, H., Liu, M., and Wang, Y. (2015). The improvement and realization of speech enhancement algorithm based on wiener filtering. 2015 8th International Congress on Image and Signal Processing (CISP), IEEE.10.1109/CISP.2015.7408047 ↗
37. A theory for multiresolution signal decomposition: The wavelet representation10.1109/34.192463 ↗
38. Speech enhancement using spectral over-subtraction and residual noise reduction10.1109/SCS.2003.1226974 ↗
39. Adapting to unknown smoothness via wavelet shrinkage10.1080/01621459.1995.10476626 ↗
40. Tian, Z., and Sadler, B.M. (2005). Weighted energy detection of ultra-wideband signals. IEEE 6th Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications 2005, IEEE.
41. Speech enhancement using a minimum-mean square error short-time spectral amplitude estimator10.1109/TASSP.1984.1164453 ↗
42. Mean-median based noise estimation method using spectral subtraction for speech enhancement technique
43. Refined composite multivariate multiscale fuzzy dispersion entropy: Theoretical analysis and applications10.1016/j.chaos.2024.115128 ↗
44. Time delay estimation via cross-correlation in the presence of large estimation errors10.1109/TASSP.1982.1163992 ↗
45. A limited memory algorithm for bound constrained optimization10.1137/0916069 ↗