Situational Awareness from Environmental Sounds

Environmental sounds provide many contextual cues that enable us to recognize important aspects of our surroundings. The goal of this project is to consider techniques to allow machines to extract and classify features from pre-defined classes of sounds in the environment. We will present the different phases of the project: capture of environmental audio, pre-processing of audio data, feature extraction using power spectral density and filter-banks, training and testing via a simple nearest-neighbor algorithm. We will discuss some preliminary results and future work on incorporating such techniques on a wearable computer to provide a form of "situational awareness" to the system.