SoundNet

SoundNet Vehicular ad hoc communication system

Sunny Gandhi
Department of Computer Science, Troy University

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Abstract
Cars are pervasive in todays environment.
And, as the distance are getting longer day by
day, road traffic is everyday reality accidents
are becoming a leading cause of death by
injury globally.
The SoundNet presents, a technique that
leverages the sound source localization
methods in outdoor, using microphones to
reduce the number of road traffic accidents in
non-line sight vision scenarios or at
Intersections.
To do this we generate the sound from the
source which gets frequency shifted when it
reflects from any moving objects passing
through the lane. We measure the shift with the
microphone to infer the positions of the object.
SoundNet will describe the phenomena and the
detection algorithm, demonstrate how it can be
used for the other vehicle, which is non line of
sight to detect its presence to stop the accident.
We checked the accuracy of SoundNet for
speed it is 97% accuracy in term of finding the
speed of the car passing by the microphone
1. Introduction
Each year in the United States, motor vehicle
crashes account for about 40,000 deaths, more
than three million injuries, and over $130
billion in financial losses. The pursue of
advanced vehicle collision warning system is
one of many efforts by auto makers and
national highway traffic safety administration
to reduce the crash rate [1], [2], [3], [4], [5],
[6], [7]. Preliminary results have shown that
the introduction of collision warning systems
could dramatically reduce crash fatalities,
injuries and property damage [1]. Studies
carried out by Daimler-Benz and National

Highway Traffic Safety Administration

(NHTSA) suggest that additional one second
warning could reduce the rear end and
intersection accident rate by 50 to 90% [8], and
Eaton reported that the actual truck fleet
accident frequency was reduced by 73% after
the fleets being equipped with the VORAD
Forward and Side Collision warning systems
by Eaton [8].
Despite the fact that intersection collisions
account for almost 30% of all crashes,
intersection collision avoidance systems
received less attention than the forward
collision avoidance systems [2], [3], [6]. It is
because the intersection collision problem is
more complicated than rear-end crash and the
limitations of the radar technology, the most
widely used object sensing method in vehicle
collision avoidance systems. Most radar
systems require line-of-sight for object
detection. Yet in most intersection crash cases,
the principle other vehicle (POV) is hidden
from the line of sight of the subject vehicle
(SV) until the last second before the collision.
This renders ineffective most collision
warning/avoidance systems that require line-ofsight for threat detection.
SoundNet is process of designing and
developing the system capable of intersection
collision warning using a new approach.
SoundNet is based upon the sound energy
emitted by the vehicles.
Threat detection is detected by mapping sound
frequency emitted by vehicles, understand its
positions, relative speed and direction. By
sharing the information between peers, each
vehicle is able to predict potential hazards.
This system does not require a support of
expensive infrastructure. Research under way
to get the accuracy in their actual location with
change of speed The result shown here were
generated using MATLAB [The reason for
choosing MATLAB as the analysis and
simulation tool is that it has more flexible

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choices to support the simulation and is easy to

do modification or data recording], two general
purpose microphone to emulate an actual
intersection scenario. As more research under
this topic, we envision a near future when this
type of system will demonstrate its advantage
in public use, complementing the function of
other
driver
How
many
vehicles
in the
Lane
Change
of speed

Location
of
vehicle

Direction
of the
vehicles
in action

assistance systems.

wind and many more sources. Vehicles of the

same kind and working in similar conditions
(Here class means cars, trucks etc.) will
generate similar noises, or have some kind of
noise signature. This noise pattern gives a clue
to detect a vehicle and recognize its class. Our
research goal is to characterize noise patterns
and use them to detected sound is from a
vehicle of known type so the information can
be transferred to the other vehicle in non-line
of sight vehicle to avoid collisions. When
travelling at different speeds, under, a vehicle
emits different noise patterns. These noises can
be sampled or digitized and grouped in a series
of time slices (frames); then if the spectrum
changes with time, it can be de- scribed in the
frequency domain as the change of frequency
spectrum distribution over frames. SoundNet
uses frequency modulation techniques to
extract sound signature from the frequency
distribution of the noise produces by the
vehicle. SoundNet was also able to find and
provide solution to other related questions of
direction and speed of the vehicle with change
in time.

Section II Research Objectives

Section III Related Work

All
moving vehicles makes some kind of
noise (Sound); the noise can come from the
vibrations of the running engine, bumping and
friction of the vehicle tires with the ground,

Localization has been extensively studied in

many research papers. Early works tried to
build an empirical RF propagation model to
estimate the location by received signal
strength from multiple known access points
[9]. This method suffers from meters of
localization error and the model is very
complex in order to take the dynamics of RF
environment into account. Recent works focus
on giving a quantitative description of the
indoor environment, i.e. to create a unique
fingerprint for a given room. Various types of
fingerprints have been developed, mainly RF
fingerprints and ambient fingerprints. VANET
(Vehicular as hoc networks) represents a
rapidly emerging research field and are
considered essential for cooperative among
vehicles on road. VANET uses moving cars as
nodes in a network to create a mobile network.
VANET turs every participating car into a

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wireless to create a mobile router allowing cars

approximately 100 to 300 meters of each other
to connect and, in turn, create a network with a
wide range . As cars fell out of signal range and
drop out of the network other cars ca join in
connecting vehicles to one a other so that a
mob eke internet is created. It is estimated that
the first systems that will use this technology
are police and fire vehicles to communicate it
with each other. [10]

VANET

To treat the moving vehicle noise as a piecewise stationary signal, besides the engine's
running conditions, one important effect that
has to be considered is the acoustic Doppler
Effect. The maximum Doppler Effect occurs
when the recording microphone is set in the
vehicle path.
Let Delta v be the Doppler frequency shift, _
be the original frequency, _V be vehicle
travelling speed, and V be sound propagation
speed; then we have __=_ = _V=V . If the
vehicle is travelling at 30 mph and the speed of
sound is 343.4 m/s, the maximum Doppler
Effect will cause about _4:2% change at the
frequency component _. As the vehicle noise
generally has a frequency spectrum with large
low frequency components, and the recording
microphone usually is set o_ road, the resulting
Doppler shift, less than 5%, is not very
conspicuous compared with the unpredictable
changes in recording conditions. Experience
shows that taking the sound as a stationary
signal is reasonable.

Section IV SoundNet
Vehicle noise is a kind of stochastic signal. A
stochastic signal is defined as a stationary
signal if its stochastic features are timeinvariant, otherwise it is called a nonstationary signal. A vehicle that is making some
noise of interest may be idling, or moving
towards or away from an observing point
(where the recording microphone is set);
meanwhile it may be accelerating or
decelerating etc. Over an extended observing
time, the signal will generally not be stationary.
But usually the recording microphone is fixed,
and the vehicle's running conditions usually do
not change very often if it is not moving; if it is
moving, then a fairly short sound duration can
be recorded. So vehicle sound signals can be
reasonably treated as stationary, or as segments
0of stationary signal.

A. Microphone settings
Microphone plays an important
role in getting the data to
calculate and get the modulation
of frequency. The frequency set
at 44 KHz range to get the noise
bandwidth.
B. The Direction of Car is fixed in
this project. It is fixed as
parallel to the location of
microphone .As shown in the
diagram.

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Due to variations in hardware as well as

filtering in sound and microphone systems.
SoundNet requires some initial calibration to
get the right frequency bandwidth. The
SoundNet starts it will scan the frequency
between 17-19 KHz and start recording the
sound of incoming vehicles.

MOVING AVERAGE METHOD

HAMMING WNDOW - After applying the
filters, we need to apply hamming window for
signal processing for better bin calculations.
[11]
Here the sampling frequency is set at 8000 Hz
and the channels (number of microphone is set
at 2)
SIGNAL PROCESSING As the signals are
processed in multi reflection path and full of
noise, we need to pass the incoming frequency
into low pass filter. Low A low-pass filter is a
filter that allows signals below a cutoff
frequency (known as the passband) and
attenuates signals above the cutoff frequency
(known as the stopband). By removing some
frequencies, the filter creates a smoothing
effect. That is, the filter produces slow changes
in output values to make it easier to see trends
and boost the overall signal-to-noise ratio with
minimal signal degradation. We use moving
average method of filtering.

TIME DOMAIN the time domain information

of the recorded sound frequency and its FFT
function are recorded. To get the dominate
frequency we used FFT transformation to the
input signal.

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The settings are as follows

1. Microphone are at 10m distance from
each other.
2. The car was driven at a speed of 20
mpg.
3. Two reading were taken.
4. One in going from A to B in forward
direction.
5. Other is going to A to B in reverse order
the speed in reverse order was set at 10
mpg.
FAST FOURIER TRANSFORM Using this
important tool we can get out the frequency
spectrum out of the input signal , this is
important to get the dominate frequency from
the input signal and to use that to get the
location of the vehicle.

The figure shows the frequency in MATLAB

The green part shows the matrix represent by

the microphone close to the car and blue is the
matrix information of the microphone which is
far away at location B

The above shows the Fast Fourier

Transformation of the original and filtered
signal in MATLAB.
SPEED Calculation Informal tests with 2
Microphone connected to laptop on which it is
recording sound on MATLAB is done and the
input signal graph is plotted in MATLAB to
check the accuracy of the test.
The test is done with 4 friends, 2 laptop and 2
microphone connected to same laptop so long
connector wires are needed initially.
The experiment is performed in early morning
hours where there is change of getting the
maximum accuracy as less number of interface
from other subjects [12]

The 2 spike represent the time when the car

passes the microphone at point A and B
This is a typical time amplitude graph in
MATLAB and this is represented the time the
microphone started to listen to the sound of the
car and till certain second, this goes it the
duration of the event (till 12 sec), but we can
set it to record the sound signal for more than
that with minor change in the MATLAB
recording process, but that will make the
process more slow and heavy for the system
development and deployment of the speed
chart.

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been suggested to be used after the cross

correlation [14].

The chart showed the range speed response

pattern generated in MATLAB. The chart
displayed the range around 10 mpg, the reason
of the error are not studied here and remain to
be open problem for the final paper.
Time difference of arrival (TDOA) Time delay estimation (TDE) between signals
received at two microphones has been proven
to be a useful parameter for many applications
recently. Five different time delay estimation
methods are tried and tested in MATLAB for
the purpose of getting the location of the
vehicle. These methods are cross-correlation
(CC), phase transform (PHAT), maximum
likelihood estimator (ML), adaptive least mean
square filter (LMS) and average square
difference function (ASDF)[13].

Out of all method of TDOA we choose cross

correlation (CC) methods to get the result. The
CC methods cross-correlates the microphone
outputs and considers the time argument that
corresponds to the maximum peak in the output
as the estimated time delay. To improve the
peak detection and time delay estimation,
various filters, or weighting functions, have

TDOA is effected by the following elements of

the surrounding
1.
2.
3.
4.

Reflection from the surroundings.

Background noise from other vehicles.
Observation time interval.
Reverberation

This effects the Sound to Noise ratio (SNR)

and decrease the performance of the time delay
estimators. Out of above the background noise
and reverberation effects the [15]
We did the TDOA in MATLAB and get the
input from 2 microphone in time domain

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SIMULATION IN MATLAB - Firstly, the

simulation is carried out in simulated noisy
environment, where the additive noises and in
equation (1) are assumed to be Gaussian. They
are uncorrelated and have zero-mean. ) (1tn)
(2tn)
In MATLAB, a zero mean Gaussian signal can
be generated by using command randn,
whose variance is one.
Choose the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as
16.36dB and the time delay as 243T seconds,
where T is the source signal sampling period
( in MATLAB, the sampling frequency of
signal mtlb is 7418Hz, T is 1.3481x10-4s).
The cross-correlation results using CC, PHAT
and ML are shown in Figure below

in MATLAB. It is worth noting in Figure 7, the

y-coordinate yields the error square of the two
difference noisy signal instead of their crosscorrelations. It is apparent that the time lag
corresponding to the minimum error is the
same as the actual time delay.
The actual output of MATLAB is shown below

Conclusion

The x-coordinate denotes the time-lag, and the

y-coordinate denotes the resulted crosscorrelations. Choose the value 243T as the
actual time-delay, using ASDF algorithm, the
simulation result is plotted in Figure below

And the SNR is calculated as 16.38dB, where

the insignificant SNR value difference is due to
that the Gaussian noise is generated randomly

The pursuit of advanced vehicle collision

warning system is one of many efforts by auto
makers, national highway traffic safety
administration, and U.S. department of
transportation
(Intelligent
Transportation
System), etc., to reduce the accident rate. Most
of the existing collision warning and avoidance
systems are designed for forward and side
collision warning. Very recently, NHTSA did a
detailed study of intersection collision
scenarios, and developed a prototype for
intersection collision warning. Yet, the function
of their system is limited by the use of radar as
the only threat detection tool, as most of other
collision warning systems do. Observing the
limitations of present systems, we designed and
implemented a new low cost peer-to peer
beacon-based collision warning system. This
new system doesnt have the limitation of
requiring line-of-sight to operate properly, thus
it can handle the hidden vehicle problem. We
could answer most of the answers of the
research objective , the problem is to get the

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accuracy of location with varied pace of the

vehicle movement. This can be done by doing
some further research into the TDOA methods
and studying some other related papers. From
this topic we studied important topic related to
the TDOA and how to use different method of
object triangulation to get the location of the
vehicle.
.

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