Exploring Sound Signature for Vehicle Detection and Classification Using ANN

This paper attempts to explore the possibility of using sound signatures for vehicle detection and classification purposes. Sound emitted by vehicles are captured for a two lane undivided road carrying moderate traffic. Simultaneous arrival of different types vehicles, overtaking at the study location, sound of horns, random but identifiable back ground noises, continuous high energy noises on the back ground are the different challenges encountered in the data collection. Different features were explored out of which smoothed log energy was found to be useful for automatic vehicle detection by locating peaks. Melfrequency ceptral coefficients extracted from fixed regions around the detected peaks along with the manual vehicle labels are utilised to train an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The classifier for four broad classes heavy, medium, light and horns was trained. The ANN classifier developed was able to predict categories well.