VehicleSense: A Reliable Sound-based Transportation Mode Recognition System for Smartphones

A new transportation mode recognition system for smartphones, VehicleSense that is widely applicable to mobile context-aware services is proposed. VehicleSense aims at achieving three performance objectives: high accuracy, low latency, and low power consumption at once by exploiting sound characteristics captured from the built-in microphone while being on candidate transportations. To attain high energy efficiency, VehicleSense adopts hierarchical accelerometer-based triggers that minimize the activation of the microphone of smartphones. Further, to attain high accuracy and low latency, VehicleSense makes use of non-linear filters that can best extract the transportation sound samples. Our 186-hour log of sound and accelerometer data collected by seven different Android smartphone models confirms that VehicleSense achieves the recognition accuracy of 98.2% with only 0.5 seconds of sound sampling at the power consumption of 26.1 mW on average for all day monitoring.