Privacy-respecting detection and localization of sounds in autonomous driving applications

Abstract

The described aspects and implementations enable privacy-respecting detection, separation, and localization of sounds in vehicle environments. The techniques include obtaining, using audio detector(s) of a vehicle, a sound recording that includes a plurality of elemental sounds (ESs) in a driving environment of the vehicle, and processing, using a sound separation model, the sound recording to separate individual ESs of the plurality of ESs. The techniques further include identifying a content of individual ESs and causing a driving path of the vehicle to be modified in view of the identified content of the individual ESs. Further techniques include rendering speech imperceptibly by redacting temporal portions of the speech, using sound recognition models to identify and discard recordings of speech, and driving at speeds that exceed threshold speeds at which speech becomes imperceptible from noise masking.