Detecting approach of emergency vehicles using siren sound processing*

When an emergency vehicle approaches a self- driving automobile, the automobile must give precedence to the emergency vehicle and needs to perform driving operations such as stopping or yielding. This requires the ability to automatically detect the approach of an emergency vehicle. In this study, for siren sounds based on emergency vehicle standards in Japan, we developed a method that uses siren sound processing to detect the approach of emergency vehicles and identify the type. These methods were used to evaluate the detection and identification of multiple types of emergency vehicle sound sources and in the presence of background noise set to approximate a real driving environment.