Estimation of vehicle speed by analysis of drive-by noise is a known technique. The methods used in this kind of practice generally estimate the velocity of the vehicle with respect to the microphone(s), so they rely on the relative motion of the vehicle to the microphone(s). There are also other methods that do not rely on this technique. For example, recent research has shown that there is a statistical correlation between vehicle speed and drive-by noise emissions spectra. This does not rely on the relative motion of the vehicle with respect to the microphone(s) so it inspires us to consider the possibility of predicting velocity of the vehicle using an on-board microphone. This has the potential for the development of a new kind of speed sensor. For this purpose we record sound signal from a vehicle under speed variation using an on-board microphone. Sound emissions from a vehicle are very complex, which is from the engine, the exhaust, the air conditioner, other mechanical parts, tires, and air resistance. These emissions carry both stationary and non-stationary information. We propose to make the analysis by wavelet packet analysis, rather than traditional time or frequency domain methods. Wavelet packet analysis, by providing arbitrary time-frequency resolution, enables analyzing signals of stationary and non-stationary nature. It has better time representation than Fourier analysis and better high-frequency resolution than Wavelet analysis. Subsignals from the wavelet packet analysis are analyzed further by Norm Entropy, Log Energy Entropy, and Energy. These features are evaluated by feeding them into a multilayer perceptron. Norm entropy achieves the best prediction with 97.89% average accuracy with 1.11 km/h mean absolute error which corresponds to 2.11% relative error. Time sensitivity is ±0.453 s and is open to improvement by varying the window width. The results indicate that, with further tests at other speed ranges, with other vehicles and under dynamic conditions, this method can be extended to the design of a new kind of vehicle speed sensor.
Dynamic Reconfigurable on the Lifting Steps Wavelet Packet Processor with Frame-Based Psychoacoustic Optimized Time- Frequency Tiling for Real-Time Audio Applications