HDSpeed: Hybrid Detection of Vehicle Speed via Acoustic Sensing on Smartphones

Abstract

Speeding is one of the biggest threatens to road safety. However, facilities like radar detector and speed camera are not deployed everywhere, as roads in some areas like campus and residential areas often lack these facilities. Several solutions either depend on pre-deployed infrastructures, or require additional devices, which motivate us to explore the practicability of using smartphones’ acoustic sensors to detect vehicle speed. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Detection system for vehicle Speed (HDSpeed). We first investigate the relationship between acoustic pattern and vehicle speed. According to our findings on typical patterns of both electric vehicles (EVs) and gasoline vehicles (GVs), we separately extract different features from the acoustic signals of EVs and GVs. A CNN and an LSTMN are designed for training EV and GV models, respectively. Considering that applying neural networks obtains coarse-grained information like a speed section, we propose a detection method based on active acoustic sensing, in which method HDSpeed calculates the fine-grained speed by detecting the distance change between the smartphone and the passing vehicle. In addition, the previously detected speed section can eliminate interferences of surrounding moving objects. Through extensive experiments in real driving environments, HDSpeed achieves an average error of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2.17km/h$</tex-math></inline-formula> .