Low-Power, Neuromorphic, Acoustic Anomaly Detection for Persistent Machine Monitoring

Abstract

Persistent acoustic monitoring can detect machine faults without physical contact, but always-on inference is constrained by power, latency, and deployment complexity. We demonstrate autoencoder-based acoustic anomaly detection on an Intel Loihi 2 neuromorphic processor under clean and noisy conditions. Log-mel features are computed off chip; normalization, autoencoder inference, L1 reconstruction scoring, and thresholding run on chip. In a clean, microphone-position-invariant ToyADMOS ToyCar benchmark, the on-chip model achieves 0.9959 AUC and 0.9785 standardized pAUC at maximum false-positive rate 0.1. In the DCASE 2026 Task 2 ToyCar noisy benchmark, the model achieves source AUC 0.7990, target AUC 0.6466, and pAUC 0.6426, exceeding reported baseline metrics. Power profiling on a 16-chip Loihi 2 VPX system shows real-time throughput with 0.0406x20130.0426 mJ dynamic energy per sample, two orders of magnitude lower than both a CPU and GPU. These results support neuromorphic acoustic anomaly detection as a practical candidate for low-power, persistent machine monitoring.