Where am I? Scene Recognition for Mobile Robots using Audio Features

Automatic recognition of unstructured environments is an important problem for mobile robots. We focus on using audio features to recognize different auditory environments, where they are characterized by different types of sounds. The use of audio information provides a complementary means of scene recognition that can effectively augment visual information. In particular, audio can be used toward both the analysis and characterization of the environment at a higher level of abstraction. We begin our investigation of recognizing different auditory environments with the audio information. In this paper, we utilize low-level audio features from a mobile robot and investigate using high-level features based on spectral analysis for scene characterization, and a recognition system was built to discriminate between different environments based on these audio features found.