Human trafficking is a universal problem, persistent despite numerous efforts to combat it globally. Individuals of any age, race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, immigration status, cultural background, religion, socioeconomic class, and education can be a victim of human trafficking. With the advancements in technology and the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs), human traffickers will adopt new ways to transport victims, which could accelerate the growth of organized human trafficking networks, which can make the detection of trafficking in persons more challenging for law enforcement agencies. The objective of this study is to develop an innovative audio analytics-based human trafficking detection framework for autonomous vehicles. The primary contributions of this study are to: (i) define four non-trivial, feasible, and realistic human trafficking scenarios for AVs; (ii) create a new and comprehensive audio dataset related to human trafficking with five classes i.e., crying, screaming, car door banging, car noise, and conversation; and (iii) develop a deep 1-D Convolution Neural Network (CNN) architecture for audio data classification related to human trafficking. We have also conducted a case study using the new audio dataset and evaluated the audio classification performance of the deep 1-D CNN. Our analyses reveal that the deep 1-D CNN can distinguish sound coming from a human trafficking victim from a non-human trafficking sound with an accuracy of 95%, which proves the efficacy of our framework.
The University of Alabama（阿拉巴马大学）；General Motors R&D（通用汽车研发中心）
Sense of hearing is crucial for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to better perceive its surrounding environment. Although visual sensors of an AV, such as camera, lidar, and radar, help to see its surrounding environment, an AV cannot see beyond those sensors line of sight. On the other hand, an AV s sense of hearing cannot be obstructed by line of sight. For example, an AV can identify an emergency vehicle s siren through audio classification even though the emergency vehicle is not within the line of sight of the AV. Thus, auditory perception is complementary to the camera, lidar, and radar-based p…
Faculty of Electrical Engineering University of Montenegro Podgorica, Montenegro；Faculty of Maritime Studies University of Montenegro Kotor, Montenegro
Accurate speed estimation of road vehicles is important for several reasons. One is speed limit enforcement, which represents a crucial tool in decreasing traffic accidents and fatalities. Compared with other research areas and domains, the number of available datasets for vehicle speed estimation is still very limited. We present a dataset of on-road audio-video recordings of single vehicles passing by a camera at known speeds, maintained stable by the on-board cruise control. The dataset contains thirteen vehicles, selected to be as diverse as possible in terms of manufacturer, production ye…
From Large-scale Audio Tagging to Real-Time Explainable Emergency Vehicle Sirens Detection
Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics (DISIM), University of L’Aquila（信息工程、计算机科学与数学系（DISIM），拉奎拉大学）；National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT), University of L’Aquila（电信国家大学间联合体（CNIT），拉奎拉大学）
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究人工智能部门）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Humans are able to localize objects in the environment using both visual and auditory cues, integrating information from multiple modalities into a common reference frame. We introduce a system that can leverage unlabeled audio-visual data to learn to localize objects (moving vehicles) in a visual reference frame, purely using stereo sound at inference time. Since it is labor-intensive to manually annotate the correspondences between audio and object bounding boxes, we achieve this goal by using the co-occurrence of visual and audio streams in unlabeled videos as a form of self-supervision, wi…
In many urban areas, traffic load and noise pollution are constantly increasing. Automated systems for traffic monitoring are promising countermeasures, which allow to systematically quantify and predict local traffic flow in order to to support municipal traffic planning decisions. In this paper, we present a novel open benchmark dataset, containing 2.5 hours of stereo audio recordings of 4718 vehicle passing events captured with both high-quality sE8 and medium-quality MEMS microphones. This dataset is well suited to evaluate the use-case of deploying audio classification algorithms to embed…
Apollo Autonomous Driving USA, a Baidu company（百度公司旗下美国阿波罗自动驾驶部门）
Emergency vehicles in service have right-of-way over all other vehicles. Hence, all other vehicles are supposed to take proper actions to yield emergency vehicles with active sirens. As this task requires the cooperation between ears and eyes for human drivers, it also needs audio detection as a supplement to vision-based algorithms for fully autonomous driving vehicles. In urban driving scenarios, we need to know both the existence of emergency vehicles and their relative positions to us to decide the proper actions. We present a novel system from collecting the real-world siren data to the d…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
With the rise of deep learning and intelligent vehicle, the smart assistant has become an essential in-car component to facilitate driving and provide extra functionalities. In-car smart assistants should be able to process general as well as car-related commands and perform corresponding actions, which eases driving and improves safety. However, there is a data scarcity issue for low resource languages, hindering the development of research and applications. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, Cantonese In-car Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (CI-AVSR), for in-car command recognition in…
Looking and Listening Inside and Outside: Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems for Driver Safety Assessment and Intelligent Vehicle Decision-Making
Machine Intelligence, Interaction, and Imagination (Mi3) Laboratory（机器智能、交互与想象实验室）；Laboratory for Intelligent and Safe Automobiles (LISA)（智能与安全汽车实验室）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学）；Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research (CMCR)（医药大麻研究中心）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；audEERING GmbH（audEERING公司）
Emotion and a broader range of affective driver states can be a life decisive factor on the road. While this aspect has been investigated repeatedly, the advent of autonomous automobiles puts a new perspective on the role of computer-based emotion recognition in the car -- the passenger's one. This includes amongst others the monitoring of wellbeing during the commute such as to adjust the driving style or to adapt the info- and entertainment. This contribution aims to foresee according challenges and provide potential avenues towards affect modelling in a multimodal "audiovisual plus x" on th…
4,500 Seconds: Small Data Training Approaches for Deep UAV Audio Classification
Department of Computer Science, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA（计算机科学系，查尔斯顿学院，查尔斯顿，SC，美国）；Department of Engineering, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA（工程系，查尔斯顿学院，查尔斯顿，SC，美国）
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；U.S. Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
In the real world, autonomous driving agents navigate in highly dynamic environments full of unexpected situations where pre-trained models are unreliable. In these situations, what is immediately available to vehicles is often only human operators. Empowering autonomous driving agents with the ability to navigate in a continuous and dynamic environment and to communicate with humans through sensorimotor-grounded dialogue becomes critical. To this end, we introduce Dialogue On the ROad To Handle Irregular Events (DOROTHIE), a novel interactive simulation platform that enables the creation of u…
SRM Institute of Science and Technology（SRM科学技术研究所）
In this work, we present a rigorous end-to-end control strategy for autonomous vehicles aimed at minimizing lap times in a time attack racing event. We also introduce AutoRACE Simulator developed as a part of this research project, which was employed to simulate accurate vehicular and environmental dynamics along with realistic audio-visual effects. We adopted a hybrid imitation-reinforcement learning architecture and crafted a novel reward function to train a deep neural network policy to drive (using imitation learning) and race (using reinforcement learning) a car autonomously in less than …
