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arXiv · 2510.01082

HVAC-EAR: Eavesdropping Human Speech Using HVAC Systems

Tarikul Islam Tamiti·Biraj Joshi·Rida Hasan·Anomadarshi Barua
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Abstract

Pressure sensors are widely integrated into modern Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. As they are sensitive to acoustic pressure, they can be a source of eavesdropping. We introduce HVAC-EAR, which reconstructs intelligible speech from low-resolution, noisy pressure data with two key contributions: (i) We achieve intelligible reconstruction from as low as 0.5 kHz sampling rate, surpassing prior work limited to hot word detection, by employing a complex-valued conformer with a Complex Unifed Attention Block to capture phoneme dependencies; (ii) We mitigate transient HVAC noise by reconstructing both magnitude and phase of missing frequencies. For the first time, evaluations on real-world HVAC deployments show significant intelligibility up to 1.2 m distance, raising novel privacy concerns.

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Tarikul Islam Tamiti, Biraj Joshi, Rida Hasan, Anomadarshi Barua. 2025-10-01. HVAC-EAR: Eavesdropping Human Speech Using HVAC Systems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01082

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