My autonomous vehicle heard an ambulance

It’s simple to make autonomous vehicles hear things, but getting them to identify the sound is another matter entirely. This demo showed the test results for a system designed to identify sounds from an ambulance and from a motorcycle. The graph at the top right shows the results of a real-world simulation where an ordinary car drove around while emitting an ambulance siren. The Siemens/Mentor system used a patent-pending machine learning/neural network approach to figure where the sound was coming from (indicated in the circular chart at top right) and that the sound was, in fact, that of an ambulance siren and not something coming from an ice cream truck. Siemens is doing this work for an automotive OEM.

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