Acoustics, ADAS, and autonomous cars, oh my!

Lynn Gayowski

Trying to make sense of where automotive technology is headed can be as tricky as finding your way through a poppy field while avoiding flying monkeys. Well strap on your shiny, red, video-watching shoes because Derek Kuhn can help. Derek, VP marketing and sales for QNX, was interviewed at Telematics Detroit and did an excellent job of summing up the latest on automotive acoustics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and autonomous cars.

QNX announced the new QNX OS for Automotive Safety at Telematics Detroit, so safety was clearly top of mind during the interview. One question posed was whether automakers have the potential to use safety options as revenue generators. There's a quote here I love: "Safety shouldn't be about premium." OEMs need to find cost-effective ways to bring next-generation safety to the mass market, not just luxury vehicles.

The section of the video I find most interesting is when Derek discusses how acoustics in a car play a big role in creating "the emotion and experience of driving." Noise reduction technology and engine sound enhancement both have a significant impact on a driver's affinity for a vehicle, and OEMs are taking note.

Check out the video for yourself here, my pretties:

Scale

Guest post by Matt Watson, TI product line manager, on the new Jacinto 6 Eco processor

Matt Watson

Whenever I hear someone mention the word “scale,” several images come to mind. The first one is the thing I avoid stepping on for fear of its shocking readout. The second is what happens to my tender, east Texas skin whenever I venture to high altitudes — which is anything higher than a Houston overpass.

Since my colleagues at QNX were nice enough to let me post on their blog, I should avoid pursuing those activities further for fear of never being invited back. [Matt, you are *always* welcome here — Ed.] Instead, I’ll focus on how TI and QNX, together, are bringing incredible performance scalability to our customers in the automotive infotainment space through the new DRA72x “Jacinto 6 Eco” processor. This processor builds on the successful foundation of the “Jacinto 6” family and offers significant value to a very wide range of in-vehicle systems. This value takes three forms:

• software reusability and hardware pin-compatibility with “Jacinto 6,” resulting in faster time to market
   
• the ability to leverage the same integration capabilities as “Jacinto 6” for a lower BOM
   
• scalability to bring elements and features of high-end infotainment down to the entry-to-mid segment in a cost-effective manner
   

QNX and TI have been collaborating for over 12 years, specifically on the “Jacinto 6” platform for more than 2 years, to help bring industry-leading performance, integration, and scalability to the automotive market. Due to its similarity with “Jacinto 6”, “Jacinto 6 Eco” allows customers to leverage a mature base of TI silicon and QNX software solutions to hit the ground driving.


Jacinto 6 Eco running the QNX CAR Platform for Infotainment and Crank Storyboard Suite

We’ll see you on the road! To view more blogs from the TI team, please be sure to check out Behind The Wheel.

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Editor's note — Here's a little more about Matt:

Matt Watson is the product manager for the TI audio and automotive infotainment processors at Texas Instruments. At TI, Matt has also held roles managing software development for audio, multimedia, and infotainment groups over the last 12 years. Prior to joining TI, Matt held positions at Dolby Laboratories (focusing on low-bit rate audio coding) and Motorola Semiconductor (developing software for floating-point audio digital signal processors).

Crisper, clearer in-car communication — Roger that

Tina Jeffrey

Over the years, Telematics Detroit has become a premier venue for showing off advancements in automotive infotainment, telematics, apps, cloud connectivity, silicon, and more. If the breadth of QNX technology being demonstrated at the show this week is any indication, the event won’t disappoint. Among the highlights is our next-generation acoustics processing middleware — QNX Acoustics for Voice 3.0 — which has been architected to deliver the highest-quality audio for hands-free and speech recognition systems, enabling the ultimate acoustics experience in the car.

What is QNX Acoustics for Voice?
QNX Acoustics for Voice 3.0 is the successor to the QNX Aviage Acoustics Processing Suite 2.0. The new product includes a set of libraries — standard and premium — that offer automakers ultimate flexibility for voice processing in the harsh audio environment of the car.

The standard library provides a full-featured solution for implementing narrowband and wideband hands-free communications, operating at 8 kHz and 16kHz sample rates, respectively. It also includes innovative new features for performing echo cancellation, noise reduction, adaptive equalization, and automatic gain control. Perhaps the most valuable feature, especially for systems constrained by limited CPU cycles, is the high efficiency mode, which can process wideband and higher-bandwidth speech with substantially less CPU load. The net result: more processing headroom for other tasks.

The premium library includes all the standard library functionality, plus support for Wideband Plus, which expands the frequency range of transmitted speech to 50 Hz - 11 kHz, at a 24kHz sample rate. The introduction of Wideband Plus fulfills the higher voice quality and low noise requirements demanded by the latest smartphone connectivity protocols for telephony, VoIP services, and speech recognition. Let me recap with a table:

Supported capabilities	Standard library	Premium library
Narrowband audio: 300 – 3400Hz (8kHz sample rate)	✔	✔
Wideband audio: 50-7000Hz (16kHz sample rate)	✔	✔
Wideband Plus audio: 50Hz – 11kHz (24kHz sample rate)		✔
High efficiency mode	✔  (Wideband only)	✔
VOIP requirements for new smartphone connectivity protocols		✔
Cloud-based speech recognition requirements for new smartphone connectivity protocols		✔

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Why is high-quality speech important in the car?
Simply put, it improves the user experience and can benefit passenger safety. Also, new smartphone connectivity protocols require it. Let’s examine two use cases: hands-free voice calling, and speech recognition.

In a voice call, processing a larger bandwidth of speech and eliminating echo and noise from various sources, including wind, road, vents, fans, and tires, dramatically increases speech intelligibility — and the more intelligible the speech, the more natural the flow of conversation. Also, clearer speech has less impact on the driver’s cognitive load, enabling the driver to pay more attention to the task at hand: driving.

Speech recognition systems are becoming a primary way to manage apps and services in the car. Voice commands can initiate phone calls, select media for playback, search for points of interest (POI), and choose a destination.

Technological advancements in pre-processing voice input to remove noise and disturbances helps speech recognizers detect commands more reliably, thereby achieving higher recognition accuracy. Early speech recognition systems, by comparison, were unintuitive and performed poorly. Drivers became so frustrated that they stopped using these systems and resorted to picking up their smartphones, completely eliminating the safety benefits of speech recognition.

QNX Acoustics for Voice 3.0 is a comprehensive automotive voice solution that includes industry-leading echo cancellation, noise reduction, adaptive equalization and automatic gain control.

If you happen to be at Telematics Update in Novi Michigan this week, be sure to drop by our booth to sit in our latest concept car — a specially modified Mercedes-Benz CLA45 AMG — and experience our acoustics technologies first hand.