SoilSound: Smartphone-based Soil Moisture Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Gao, Yixuan, Ahmed, Tanvir, He, Shuang, Cheng, Zhongqi, Nandakumar, Rajalakshmi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Gao, Yixuan
Ahmed, Tanvir
He, Shuang
Cheng, Zhongqi
Nandakumar, Rajalakshmi
author_facet Gao, Yixuan
Ahmed, Tanvir
He, Shuang
Cheng, Zhongqi
Nandakumar, Rajalakshmi
contents Soil moisture monitoring is essential for agriculture and environmental management, yet existing methods require either invasive probes disturbing the soil or specialized equipment, limiting access to the public. We present SoilSound, an ubiquitous accessible smartphone-based acoustic sensing system that can measure soil moisture without disturbing the soil. We leverage the built-in speaker and microphone to perform a vertical scan mechanism to accurately measure moisture without any calibration. Unlike existing work that use transmissive properties, we propose an alternate model for acoustic reflections in soil based on the surface roughness effect to enable moisture sensing without disturbing the soil. The system works by sending acoustic chirps towards the soil and recording the reflections during a vertical scan, which are then processed and fed to a convolutional neural network for on-device soil moisture estimation with negligible computational, memory, or power overhead. We evaluated the system by training with curated soils in boxes in the lab and testing in the outdoor fields and show that SoilSound achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.39% across 10 different locations. Overall, the evaluation shows that SoilSound can accurately track soil moisture levels ranging from 15.9% to 34.0% across multiple soil types, environments, and users; without requiring any calibration or disturbing the soil, enabling widespread moisture monitoring for home gardeners, urban farmers, citizen scientists, and agricultural communities in resource-limited settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_09823
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SoilSound: Smartphone-based Soil Moisture Estimation
Gao, Yixuan
Ahmed, Tanvir
He, Shuang
Cheng, Zhongqi
Nandakumar, Rajalakshmi
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Human-Computer Interaction
Signal Processing
Soil moisture monitoring is essential for agriculture and environmental management, yet existing methods require either invasive probes disturbing the soil or specialized equipment, limiting access to the public. We present SoilSound, an ubiquitous accessible smartphone-based acoustic sensing system that can measure soil moisture without disturbing the soil. We leverage the built-in speaker and microphone to perform a vertical scan mechanism to accurately measure moisture without any calibration. Unlike existing work that use transmissive properties, we propose an alternate model for acoustic reflections in soil based on the surface roughness effect to enable moisture sensing without disturbing the soil. The system works by sending acoustic chirps towards the soil and recording the reflections during a vertical scan, which are then processed and fed to a convolutional neural network for on-device soil moisture estimation with negligible computational, memory, or power overhead. We evaluated the system by training with curated soils in boxes in the lab and testing in the outdoor fields and show that SoilSound achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.39% across 10 different locations. Overall, the evaluation shows that SoilSound can accurately track soil moisture levels ranging from 15.9% to 34.0% across multiple soil types, environments, and users; without requiring any calibration or disturbing the soil, enabling widespread moisture monitoring for home gardeners, urban farmers, citizen scientists, and agricultural communities in resource-limited settings.
title SoilSound: Smartphone-based Soil Moisture Estimation
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Human-Computer Interaction
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09823