Tyre sound classification with machine learning

Abstract: Having enough data about the usage of tyre types on the road can lead to a better understanding of the consequences of studded tyres on the environment. This paper is focused on training and testing a machine learning model which can be further integrated into a larger system for automation of the data collection process. Different machine learning algorithms, namely CNN, SVM, and Random Forest, were compared in this experiment. The method used in this paper is an empirical method. First, sound data for studded and none-studded tyres was collected from three different locations in the city of Gävle/Sweden. A total of 760 Mel spectrograms from both classes was generated to train and test a well-known CNN model (AlexNet) on MATLAB. Sound features for both classes were extracted using JAudio to train and test models that use SVM and Random Forest classifi-ers on Weka. Unnecessary features were removed one by one from the list of features to improve the performance of the classifiers. The result shows that CNN achieved accuracy of 84%, SVM has the best performance both with and without removing some audio features (i.e 94% and 92%, respectively), while Random Forest has 89 % accuracy. The test data is comprised of 51% of the studded class and 49% of the none-studded class and the result of the SVM model has achieved more than 94 %. Therefore, it can be considered as an acceptable result that can be used in practice.