Appliance fingerprinting using sound from power supply

Abstract

Recognizing the working appliances is of great importance for smart environment to provide services including energy conservation, user activity recognition, fire hazard prevention, etc. There have been many methods proposed to recognize appliances by analyzing the power voltage, current, electromagnetic emissions, vibration, light, and sound from appliances. Among these methods, measuring the power voltage and current requires installing intrusive sensors to each appliance. Measuring the electromagnetic emissions and vibration requires sensors to be attached or close (e.g., < 15cm) to the appliances. Methods relying on light are not universally applicable since only part of appliances generate light. Similarly, methods using sound relying on the sound from motor vibration or mechanical collision so are not applicable for many appliances. As a result, existing methods for appliance fingerprinting are intrusive, have high deployment cost, or only work for part of appliances. In this work, we proposed to use the inaudible high-frequency sound generated by the switching-mode power supply (SMPS) of the appliances as fingerprints to recognize appliances. Since SMPS is widely adopted in home appliances, the proposed method can work for most appliances. Our preliminary experiments on 18 household appliances (where 10 are of the same models) showed that the recognition accuracy achieves 97.6%.