Modern cars already feature a range of sophisticated systems such as remote-controlled parking, automatic lane-departure warning and drowsiness recognition. In the future, self-driving cars will also have auditory capabilities. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Oldenburg, Germany, have now developed a prototype system capable of recognizing external noises such as sirens.
Modern cars are equipped with a host of advanced driver-assistance systems designed to reduce the burden behind the wheel. Features such as automatic parking and blind-spot monitoring employ cameras and radar and lidar technology to detect obstacles in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle. In other words, they provide vehicles with a rudimentary sense of sight. Cars have yet to be endowed with sense of hearing. In the future, however, systems that can capture and identify external noises are set to play a key role—along with smart radar and camera sensors—in putting self-driving cars on the road. Researchers at Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg are now developing AI-based systems that can recognize individual acoustic events. These will give vehicles auditory capability.
“Despite the huge potential of such applications, no autonomous vehicle has yet been equipped with a system capable of perceiving external noises,” says Danilo Hollosi, head of the Acoustic Event Recognition group at Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg. “Such systems would be able to immediately recognize the siren of an approaching emergency vehicle, for example, so that the autonomous vehicle would then know to move over to one side of the highway and form an access lane for the rescue services.” There are numerous other scenarios in which an acoustic early-warning system can play a vital role—when an autonomous vehicle is turning into a pedestrian area or residential road where children are playing, for example, or for recognizing defects or dangerous situations such as a nail in a tire. In addition, such systems could also be used to monitor the condition of the vehicle or even double as an emergency telephone equipped with voice-recognition technology.
[…]
