Geolocation by aeroplane sound Doppler shift

[Mick West]

Well, I just did another 20-minute recording, and the first attempt put me in Long Beach, like 400 miles away

 

[Trailblazer]

UK would be useful.

I have my phone outside recording a video at the moment. I can hear a loud plane passing over even from indoors right now!

 

[GM4AJK]

Despite this new one being a bit niche, it seems the concept is opening up the whole topic of "side-channel information hidden in audio streams"

You can actually do this with far greater accuracy using just church bells.

Can't quite believe it, but I tested it and it works.Planes need a timestamp and unbroken sound.

I tested 56 normal YouTube videos: 0 worked.Bells need a few seconds.

The bell ringers' database (Dove's Guide) logs every bell tower in England, 5,896 of them, all unique Hz, with the note of its biggest bell.

From a video with few seconds of the audio, the bells in a Derbyshire walk picked out the one church. I'm stunned.

 

[GM4AJK]

It's not that difficult to copy it, but any hurdle added lessen the amount of time it'll get abused. And you don't want Sitrec being cited in the news as the tool used by a killer to locate his victim.

GM4AJK:
Security by obscurity. There will likely be a ton of tools to do this by the end of next week. The best @Mick West can do is hold off on releasing it in Sitrec for a while.

@RobertBillyBob Didn't even have to wait till the end of next week. Wednesday was long enough: DOPPLERGEIST

DOPPLERGEIST is a source-available Python toolkit for aircraft Doppler audio geolocation. It detects acoustic flyover patterns in recordings, matches them against historical ADS-B flight trajectories, and ranks possible recording locations.

The project provides automatic audio discovery, aircraft-data acquisition, geographic search, and a locally hosted browser interface. It is built for acoustic geolocation research, audio forensics, and studying location information carried by background sound.

 

[FatPhil]

The cat is out of the bag. Restricting stuff now is pointless.

That is a logically fallacious argument. That something is available elsewhere is in no way a positive argument for it to be made available here. At the moment there have been presented one cogent argument against it being made available here - the stalking one - and zero arguments for making it available. As a disinterested observer, one side seems to be making a stronger case.

 

[Mendel]

I'll get it working better with known time and location data first. Then try some unknown cases. Right now it's failing where it should succeed, so that needs fixing.

Known time and location might be a good feature for sitrec, though? Just some kind of output that can say "matching aircraft corroborated by audio", as an additional piece of evidence supporting the analysis.