As a part of the OptiPEx project, IAV participated in the 29th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2026), held in Naples, Italy, from 15–18 September 2026, where researcher Diva Pant presented our paper titled An Acoustic Perception Module for In-Cabin Emergency Detection in Public Transportation.
The paper presents a two-stage acoustic perception framework designed to enhance safety monitoring in public transport environments through non-visual sensing. The proposed approach combines Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED) to identify and classify safety-relevant acoustic events such as human distress, crying, glass breaking, and sirens, even under challenging conditions involving background noise and overlapping events. The evaluation demonstrated significant improvements over established baseline approaches for both anomaly detection and event classification, highlighting the potential of acoustic sensing as a complementary safety layer in situations where visual monitoring may be limited by occlusions, crowding, or poor lighting conditions.
The work aligns closely with the project’s objectives in the areas of intelligent sensing, safety monitoring, and future autonomous public transportation systems. It also contributes to the broader discussion on how acoustic perception can support situational awareness and decision-support capabilities in next-generation transport environments
