Removing Speech, Keeping Activities: A Privacy Firewall for Acoustic Sensing in Assisted Living

arXiv:2609.02376 · cs.SD, cs.CR, cs.HC · Submitted 2026-09-02 · Read on arXiv

cs.SD, cs.CR, cs.HC

Submitted: 2026-09-02

Updated: 2026-09-02

Comments: 42 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. Submitted to Pervasive and Mobile Computing. Preprint also available on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7369016

Code: https://github.com/snakers4/silero-vad

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Acoustic Activity Classification — 23× in this paper
• Voice Activity Detection — 16× in this paper
• Accuracy — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Machine Learning — 7× in this paper
• Transfer Learning — 7× in this paper · explained in 10 episodes
• Benchmark — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Activation Function — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Convolutional Neural Network — 3× in this paper
• Embeddings — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fidelity — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 3× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Adam — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Audio Spectrogram Transformer — 2× in this paper
• Data Augmentation — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Feature Extraction — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Aggregation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Clustering — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Diffusion Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 8 episodes
• Diffusion Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Downstream Tasks — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Foundation Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Generative Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ontology — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Support Vector Machines — 1× in this paper

Sources

• Real Time Speech Enhancement in the Waveform Domain
• SPMamba: State-space model is all you need in speech separation
• MossFormer2: Combining Transformer and RNN-Free Recurrent Network for Enhanced Time-Domain Monaural Speech Separation
• 30+ Years of Source Separation Research: Achievements and Future Challenges
• WHAM!: Extending Speech Separation to Noisy Environments
• LibriheavyMix: A 20,000-Hour Dataset for Single-Channel Reverberant Multi-Talker Speech Separation, ASR and Speaker Diarization
• AST: Audio Spectrogram Transformer
• DCASE 2018 Challenge - Task 5: Monitoring of domestic activities based on multi-channel acoustics
• Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition
• The INTERSPEECH 2020 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge: Datasets, Subjective Testing Framework, and Challenge Results

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