Pre-training Autoencoder for Acoustic Event Classification via Blinky

In the acoustic event classification (AEC) framework that employs Blinkies, audio signals are converted into LED light emissions and subsequently captured by a single video camera. However, the 30 fps optical transmission channel conveys only about 0.2% of the normal audio bandwidth and is highly susceptible to noise. We propose a novel sound-to-light conversion method that leverages the encoder of a pre-trained autoencoder (AE) to distill compact, discriminative features from the recorded audio. To pre-train the AE, we adopt a noise-robust learning strategy in which artificial noise is injected into the encoder's latent representations during training, thereby enhancing the model's robustness against channel noise. The encoder architecture is specifically designed for the memory footprint of contemporary edge devices such as the Raspberry Pi 4. In a simulation experiment on the ESC-50 dataset under a stringent 15 Hz bandwidth constraint, the proposed method achieved higher macro-F1 scores than conventional sound-to-light conversion approaches.