Hybrid acoustic and pretrained embedding feature fusion for unmanned aerial vehicle detection using stacking ensemble learning under a leakage-aware evaluation protocol

Zahid Iqbal

Small multirotor drones produce a characteristic acoustic signature, and microphones offer a low-cost way to detect them. High accuracies have been reported on public drone audio benchmarks, often with random clip-level splits of datasets built from a few long recordings and pieces of existing sound collections, so pieces of one source can appear in both training and test data. We study the binary task of the public DroneAudioDataset (11,704 one-second clips). Its 1,332 drone clips come from 257 five-second chunks of 7 recordings, and 96.4% of its non-drone clips are pieces of the 2,000 clips of the ESC-50 sound dataset. A grouped, source-disjoint protocol (five folds, three repeats) is compared with a random split. Each clip is described by 57 hand-crafted acoustic descriptors, reduced by a hybrid minimum-redundancy maximum-relevance and ReliefF selection or by NSGA-II multi-objective search, and by a 1024-dimensional embedding from the pretrained YAMNet network. Random Forest and XGBoost learners on both views form a stacking ensemble. Under the grouped protocol, the two-view stack reached a mean accuracy of 95.29% (SD 1.62 points over 15 test folds), a specificity of 98.29%…