Material Classification from Non-Line-of-Sight Acoustic Echoes Using Wavelet-Acoustic Hybrid Feature Fusion

Acoustic material classification under non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions—where direct sound paths are obstructed—is a challenging task due to echo attenuation, complex reflections, and noise effects. This study aims to improve NLOS material recognition by introducing a novel wavelet–acoustic hybrid feature fusion method integrated with deep recurrent neural network architectures. Echo signals from nine different materials were collected using the newly developed ANLOS-R (Acoustic Non-Line-of-Sight Recognition) dataset, which was specifically designed to simulate realistic NLOS propagation environments. From these recordings, time-domain acoustic features and multi-scale wavelet-based energy and entropy statistics were extracted using ten wavelet families. The resulting 70-dimensional hybrid feature set was used to train several deep learning architectures, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Convolutional Neural Network–LSTM (CNN–LSTM). Among these, the CNN–LSTM achieved the highest balanced accuracy and macro-F1 score of 0.99, showing strong generalization and convergence performance. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis indicated that Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and wavelet entropy–energy features play complementary roles in material discrimination. The proposed approach provides a robust and interpretable framework for real-time NLOS acoustic sensing, bridging data-driven deep learning with the physical understanding of acoustic material behavior.