Techniques of Acoustic Feature Extraction for Detection and Classification of Ground Vehicles

Vehicles may be recognized from the sound from the sound they make when moving i.e. from their acoustic signature. These sounds may come from various sources including rotational parts, vibrations in the engine, friction between the tires and the pavement, wind effect, gears, fans. Similar vehicles working in comparable conditions would have a similar acoustic signature that could be used for recognition. Characteristic patterns may be extracted from the Fourier description of the signature and used for recognition. Classification of ground vehicles based on acoustic signals can be employed effectively in battlefield surveillance, traffic control, and many other applications. The classification performance depends on the selection of signal features that determine the separation of different signal classes. This paper compares various available techniques of acoustic feature extraction for detection and classification of ground vehicles. Finally we present an overview of the methods discussed and their success rate in tabular form along with the classifier used.