Design and Evaluation of a Prototype System for Real-Time Monitoring of Vehicle Honking

Misuse of vehicle horns by irresponsible drivers can be a source of noise pollution. The first step in eliminating such misuse is to monitor horn use in order to identify the culprit. This paper reports the development of an effective overhead honking monitoring system for this purpose. Integrating techniques of sensor array, time sequence analysis, sound source localization, and data fusion, this proposed system recognizes the sound of vehicle horn, determines the position of the sound-emitting vehicle, and visualizes it in an image captured by the road monitoring camera. The performance of this proposed system has been evaluated via experiments conducted under different typical urbane scenarios.