Real-time Emergency Vehicle Event Detection Using Audio Data

In this work, we focus on detecting emergency vehicles using only audio data. Improved and quick detection can help in faster preemption of these vehicles at signalized intersections thereby reducing overall response time in case of emergencies. Important audio features were extracted from raw data and passed into extreme learning machines (ELM) for training. ELMs have been used in this work because of its simplicity and shorter run-time which can therefore be used for online learning. Recently, there have been many studies that focus on sound classification but most of the methods used are complex to train and implement. The results from this paper show that ELM can achieve similar performance with exceptionally shorter training times. The accuracy reported for ELM is about 97% for emergency vehicle detection (EVD).