Car noise verification and applications

Abstract

This study presents audio based vehicle-verification as a new area of research. The task involves verifying the claim that an acoustic sample belongs to a vehicle. Audio based vehicle verification has the potential to impact research in the areas of vehicle forensics and in-vehicle speech systems. For this task, a new corpus (UTD-CAR-NOISE) that consists of noise from 20 vehicles under 8 distinct noise environments (8 hours of data). Our approach towards vehicle verification hypothesizes that some specific environments are more suited for vehicle verification. Towards this goal, four diverse in-vehicle noise conditions are identified on the basis of their frequency of occurrence. Additionally, four different verification systems are proposed based on their complexity and modeling strategies. Our evaluation shows that A/C on with windows closed condition is the most conducive for vehicle verification (98 %). The proposed systems were evaluated on approximately 100,000 trials, achieving performances in the range of (75-98 %) for different vehicle environments. © 2013 The Author(s).