An Efficient Anomalous Sound Detection System for Microcontrollers ^†

Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) systems are pivotal in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Through the early detection of machines’ anomalies, these systems facilitate proactive maintenance, thereby mitigating potential losses. Although prior studies have improved system accuracy using various advanced machine learning technologies, they frequently neglect the associated substantial computing and storage demands, which are crucial in resource-constrained IIoT environments. In this paper, we propose an ASD system that is efficiently optimized for both software and hardware considerations regarding edge intelligence. For the software aspect, we identify signal variation as a critical issue for ASD. Hence, we introduce a suite of lightweight yet robust processing techniques that enhance accuracy while minimizing resource consumption. As for the hardware aspect, we find that memory constraints may be a significant challenge for deploying ASD systems on microcontrollers (MCUs). Therefore, we propose a memory-aware pruning algorithm specialized for ASD to fit into MCUs’ constraints. Finally, we evaluate our method on the DCASE dataset, and the results show that our system achieves favorable outcomes in both accuracy and resource efficiency, marking our contribution to ASD system practice.