Claudia Rinaldi

Marco Giordano, Stefano Giacomelli, Claudia Rinaldi et al.

We present a full-stack emergency vehicle (EV) siren detection system designed for real-time deployment on embedded hardware. The proposed approach is based on E2PANNs, a fine-tuned convolutional neural network derived from EPANNs, and optimized for binary sound event detection under urban acoustic conditions. A key contribution is the creation of curated and semantically structured datasets - AudioSet-EV, AudioSet-EV Augmented, and Unified-EV - developed using a custom AudioSet-Tools framework to overcome the low reliability of standard AudioSet annotations. The system is deployed on a Raspberry Pi 5 equipped with a high-fidelity DAC+microphone board, implementing a multithreaded inference engine with adaptive frame sizing, probability smoothing, and a decision-state machine to control false positive activations. A remote WebSocket interface provides real-time monitoring and facilitates live demonstration capabilities. Performance is evaluated using both framewise and event-based metrics across multiple configurations. Results show the system achieves low-latency detection with improved robustness under realistic audio conditions. This work demonstrates the feasibility of deploying IoS-compatible SED solutions that can form distributed acoustic monitoring networks, enabling collaborative emergency vehicle tracking across smart city infrastructures through WebSocket connectivity on low-cost edge devices.

Stefano Giacomelli, Marco Giordano, Claudia Rinaldi et al.

Accurate recognition of Emergency Vehicle (EV) sirens is critical for the integration of intelligent transportation systems, smart city monitoring systems, and autonomous driving technologies. Modern automatic solutions are limited by the lack of large scale, curated datasets and by the computational demands of state of the art sound event detection models. This work introduces E2PANNs (Efficient Emergency Pre trained Audio Neural Networks), a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network architecture derived from the PANNs framework, specifically optimized for binary EV siren detection. Leveraging our dedicated subset of AudioSet (AudioSet EV) we fine-tune and evaluate E2PANNs across multiple reference datasets and test its viability on embedded hardware. The experimental campaign includes ablation studies, cross-domain benchmarking, and real-time inference deployment on edge device. Interpretability analyses exploiting Guided Backpropagation and ScoreCAM algorithms provide insights into the model internal representations and validate its ability to capture distinct spectrotemporal patterns associated with different types of EV sirens. Real time performance is assessed through frame wise and event based detection metrics, as well as a detailed analysis of false positive activations. Results demonstrate that E2PANNs establish a new state of the art in this research domain, with high computational efficiency, and suitability for edge-based audio monitoring and safety-critical applications.

Marco Giordano, Claudia Rinaldi

Spoken language datasets are vital for advancing linguistic research, Natural Language Processing, and speech technology. However, resources dedicated to Italian, a linguistically rich and diverse Romance language, remain underexplored compared to major languages like English or Mandarin. This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of 66 spoken Italian datasets, highlighting their characteristics, methodologies, and applications. The datasets are categorized by speech type, source and context, and demographic and linguistic features, with a focus on their utility in fields such as Automatic Speech Recognition, emotion detection, and education. Challenges related to dataset scarcity, representativeness, and accessibility are discussed alongside recommendations for enhancing dataset creation and utilization. The full dataset inventory is publicly accessible via GitHub and archived on Zenodo, serving as a valuable resource for researchers and developers. By addressing current gaps and proposing future directions, this work aims to support the advancement of Italian speech technologies and linguistic research.