A glass break detector is a sensor used in electronic burglar alarms that detects if a pane of glass is shattered or broken.These sensors are commonly used near glass doors or glass store-front windows to detect if an intruder broke the glass and entered.
Glass break detectors usually use a microphone, which monitors any noise or vibrations coming from the glass. If the vibrations exceed a certain threshold (that is sometimes user selectable) they are analyzed by detector circuitry.
Simpler detectors simply use narrowband microphones tuned to frequencies typical of glass shattering, and react to sound above certain threshold, whereas more complex designs compare the sound analysis to one or more glass-break profiles using signal transforms similar to discrete cosine transform (DCT) and fast Fourier transform (FFT) and react if both the amplitude threshold and statistically expressed similarity threshold are breached.