Review of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks for Environmental Noise Monitoring in Smart Cities

Nowadays, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Since this proportion is expected to keep rising, the sustainable development of cities is of paramount importance to guarantee the quality of life of their inhabitants. Environmental noise is one of the main concerns that has to be addressed, due to its negative impact on the health of people. Different national and international noise directives and legislations have been defined during the past decades, which local authorities must comply with involving noise mapping, action plans, policing, and public awareness, among others. To this aim, a recent change in the paradigm for environmental noise monitoring has been driven by the rise of Internet of Things technology within smart cities through the design and development of wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs). This work reviews the most relevant WASN-based approaches developed to date focused on environmental noise monitoring. The proposals have moved from networks composed of high-accuracy commercial devices to the those integrated by ad hoc low-cost acoustic sensors, sometimes designed as hybrid networks with low and high computational capacity nodes. After describing the main characteristics of recent WASN-based projects, the paper also discusses several open challenges, such as the development of acoustic signal processing techniques to identify noise events, to allow the reliable and pervasive deployment of WASNs in urban areas together with some potential future applications.

[1]  Mathieu Lagrange,et al.  Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events: Outcome of the DCASE 2016 Challenge , 2018, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[2]  Joan Claudi Socoró,et al.  An Anomalous Noise Events Detector for Dynamic Road Traffic Noise Mapping in Real-Life Urban and Suburban Environments , 2017, Sensors.

[3]  Heikki Huttunen,et al.  Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks for Polyphonic Sound Event Detection , 2017, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[4]  K. Stylianos,et al.  Common Noise Assessment Methods in Europe (CNOSSOS-EU) , 2012 .

[5]  Francesc Alías,et al.  Gammatone Cepstral Coefficients: Biologically Inspired Features for Non-Speech Audio Classification , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

[6]  Nicolai Petkov,et al.  Audio Surveillance of Roads: A System for Detecting Anomalous Sounds , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[7]  Francesco Asdrubali,et al.  Innovative Approaches for Noise Management in Smart Cities: a Review , 2018, Current Pollution Reports.

[8]  Mathieu Lagrange,et al.  Road traffic sound level estimation from realistic urban sound mixtures by Non-negative Matrix Factorization , 2019 .

[9]  Stavros Ntalampiras,et al.  Universal background modeling for acoustic surveillance of urban traffic , 2014, Digit. Signal Process..

[10]  Payam Dadvand,et al.  Health impacts related to urban and transport planning: A burden of disease assessment. , 2017, Environment international.

[11]  M. Angelidou.  Smart cities: A conjuncture of four forces , 2015 .

[12]  Roberto Benocci,et al.  The LIFE DYNAMAP project: Towards a procedure for dynamic noise mapping in urban areas , 2017 .

[13]  Justin Salamon,et al.  The Implementation of Low-cost Urban Acoustic Monitoring Devices , 2016, ArXiv.

[14]  Taylor Rink,et al.  Wireless Sensor Networks for Long-Term Monitoring of Urban Noise , 2018, Sensors.

[15]  West Bengal,et al.  Environmental noise assessment and its effect on human health in an urban area , 2011 .

[16]  Tuomas Virtanen,et al.  Environmental noise monitoring using source classification in sensors , 2018 .

[17]  Cuiping Wang,et al.  Traffic noise monitoring and simulation research in Xiamen City based on the Environmental Internet of Things , 2013 .

[18]  Alexander Bertrand,et al.  Special issue on wireless acoustic sensor networks and ad hoc microphone arrays , 2015, Signal Process..

[19]  R. Guski,et al.  WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region: A Systematic Review on Environmental Noise and Annoyance , 2017, International journal of environmental research and public health.

[20]  Mariola Śliwińska-Kowalska,et al.  WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region: A Systematic Review on Environmental Noise and Permanent Hearing Loss and Tinnitus , 2017, International journal of environmental research and public health.

[21]  Roberto Benocci,et al.  DYNAMAP – Development of low cost sensors networks for real time noise mapping , 2016 .

[22]  Nikos Fakotakis,et al.  Probabilistic Novelty Detection for Acoustic Surveillance Under Real-World Conditions , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

[23]  Stavros Ntalampiras,et al.  Moving Vehicle Classification Using Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence.

[24]  Bert De Coensel,et al.  A study of the performance of a generalized exceedance algorithm for detecting noise events caused by road traffic , 2018, Applied Acoustics.

[25]  Richard L. Neitzel,et al.  Environmental Noise Pollution in the United States: Developing an Effective Public Health Response , 2013, Environmental health perspectives.

[26]  A. Gidlöf-Gunnarsson,et al.  Effects of road traffic noise and the benefit of access to quietness , 2006 .

[27]  M. Nieuwenhuijsen,et al.  WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region: A Systematic Review on Environmental Noise and Adverse Birth Outcomes , 2017, International journal of environmental research and public health.

[28]  Margaret Bell,et al.  Novel wireless pervasive sensor network to improve the understanding of noise in street canyons , 2013 .

[29]  Joan Claudi Socoró,et al.  Detection of Anomalous Noise Events on Low-Capacity Acoustic Nodes for Dynamic Road Traffic Noise Mapping within an Hybrid WASN , 2018, Sensors.

[30]  Giovanni Zambon,et al.  LIFE DYNAMAP project: The case study of Rome , 2017 .

[31]  P. W. Wessels,et al.  Design aspects of acoustic sensor networks for environmental noise monitoring , 2016 .

[32]  Federico Domínguez,et al.  Towards an Environmental Measurement Cloud: Delivering Pollution Awareness to the Public , 2014, Int. J. Distributed Sens. Networks.

[33]  Takumi Kobayashi,et al.  Urban sound event classification based on local and global features aggregation , 2017 .

[34]  Maximo Cobos,et al.  Low-Cost Alternatives for Urban Noise Nuisance Monitoring Using Wireless Sensor Networks , 2015, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[35]  Lisa Goines,et al.  Noise Pollution: A Modern Plague , 2007, Southern medical journal.

[36]  I. van Kamp,et al.  WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region: A Systematic Review of Transport Noise Interventions and Their Impacts on Health , 2017, International journal of environmental research and public health.

[37]  Jean-Marie Bonnin,et al.  Wireless sensor networks: a survey on recent developments and potential synergies , 2013, The Journal of Supercomputing.

[38]  Alessandro Tonacci,et al.  The SENSEable Pisa Project: Citizen‐Participation in Monitoring Acoustic Climate of Mediterranean City Centers , 2017 .

[39]  Francesc Alías,et al.  On the Impact of Anomalous Noise Events on Road Traffic Noise Mapping in Urban and Suburban Environments , 2017, International journal of environmental research and public health.