2025/10/17 by Chitralekha Gupta, Soundarya Ramesh, Gupta, Chitralekha +7 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech and Audio Processing #UAV Applications and Optimization #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.15383
openalex publication_date 2025/10/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones, are increasingly used in search and rescue missions to detect human presence. Existing systems primarily leverage vision-based methods which are prone to fail under low-visibility or occlusion. Drone-based audio perception offers promise but suffers from extreme ego-noise that masks sounds indicating human presence. Existing datasets are either limited in diversity or synthetic, lacking real acoustic interactions, and there are no standardized setups for drone audition. To this end, we present DroneAudioset (The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ahlab-drone-project/DroneAudioSet/ under the MIT license), a comprehensive drone audition dataset featuring 23.5 hours of annotated recordings, covering a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) from -57.2 dB to -2.5 dB, across various drone types, throttles, microphone configurations as well as environments. The dataset enables development and systematic evaluation of noise suppression and classification methods for human-presence detection under challenging conditions, while also informing practical design considerations for drone audition systems, such as microphone placement trade-offs, and development of drone noise-aware audio processing. This dataset is an important step towards enabling design and deployment of drone-audition systems.