scholarly journals Detection of Anomalous Noise Events for Real-Time Road-Traffic Noise Mapping: The Dynamap’s project case study

Noise Mapping ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Alías ◽  
Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès ◽  
Ferran Orga ◽  
Joan Claudi Socoró
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Road Traffic ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Noise Pollution ◽  
Environmental Noise ◽  
Operating Conditions ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Noise Mapping

Abstract Environmental noise is increasing year after year, especially in urban and suburban areas. Besides annoyance, environmental noise also causes harmful health effects on people. The Environmental Noise Directive 2002/49/EC (END) is the main instrument of the European Union to identify and combat noise pollution, followed by the CNOSSOS-EU methodological framework. In compliance with the END legislation, the European Member States are required to publish noise maps and action plans every five years. The emergence of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASNs) have changed the paradigm to address the END regulatory requirements, allowing the dynamic ubiquitous measurement of environmental noise pollution. Following the END, the LIFE DYNAMAP project aims to develop a WASN-based low-cost noise mapping system to monitor the acoustic impact of road infrastructures in real time. Those acoustic events unrelated to regular traffic noise should be removed from the equivalent noise level calculations to avoid biasing the noise map generation. This work describes the different approaches developed within the DYNAMAP project to implement an Anomalous Noise Event Detector on the low-cost sensors of the network, considering both synthetic and real-life acoustic data.Moreover, the paper reflects on several open challenges, discussing how to tackle them for the future deployment of WASN-based noise monitoring systems in real-life operating conditions.

ConvTasNet-based anomalous noise separation for intelligent noise monitoring

2021 ◽  
Vol 263 (4) ◽  
pp. 2044-2051
Author(s):  
Han Li ◽  
Kean Chen ◽  
Bernhard U. Seeber
Keyword(s):  
Road Traffic ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Noise Pollution ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Scale Invariant ◽  
Acoustic Sensor Networks ◽  
Noise Assessment ◽  
Sound Separation

Noise pollution has become a growing concern in public health. The availability of low-cost wireless acoustic sensor networks permits continuous monitoring of noise. However, real acoustic scenes are composed of irrelevant sources (anomalous noise) that overlap with monitored noise, causing biased evaluation and controversy. One classical scene is selected in our study. For road traffic noise assessment, other possible non-traffic noise (e.g., speech, thunder) should be excluded to obtain a reliable evaluation. Because anomalous noise is diverse, occasional, and unpredictable in real-life scenes, removing it from the mixture is a challenge. We explore a fully convolutional time-domain audio separation network (ConvTasNet) for arbitrary sound separation. ConvTasNet is trained by a large dataset, including environmental sounds, speech, and music over 150 hours. After training, the scale-invariant signal-to-distortion ratio (SI-SDR) is improved by 11.40 dB on average for an independent test dataset. ConvTasNet is next applied to anomalous noise separation of traffic noise scenes. We mix traffic noise and anomalous noise at random SNR between -10 dB to 0 dB. Separation is especially effective for salient and long-term anomalous noise, which smooth the overall sound pressure level curve over time. Results emphasize the importance of anomalous noise separation for reliable evaluation.

scholarly journals Aggregate Impact of Anomalous Noise Events on the WASN-Based Computation of Road Traffic Noise Levels in Urban and Suburban Environments

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Alías ◽  
Ferran Orga ◽  
Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès ◽  
Joan Claudi Socoró
Keyword(s):  
Sensor Networks ◽  
Road Traffic ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Noise Pollution ◽  
Environmental Noise ◽  
Integration Time ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Noise Levels ◽  
Noise Mapping ◽  
Acoustic Data

Environmental noise can be defined as the accumulation of noise pollution caused by sounds generated by outdoor human activities, Road Traffic Noise (RTN) being the main source in urban and suburban areas. To address the negative effects of environmental noise on public health, the European Environmental Noise Directive requires EU member states to tailor noise maps and define the corresponding action plans every five years for major agglomerations and key infrastructures. Noise maps have been hitherto created from expert-based measurements, after cleaning the recorded acoustic data of undesired acoustic events, or Anomalous Noise Events (ANEs). In recent years, Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASNs) have become an alternative. However, most of the proposals focus on measuring global noise levels without taking into account the presence of ANEs. The LIFE DYNAMAP project has developed a WASN-based dynamic noise mapping system to analyze the acoustic impact of road infrastructures in real time based solely on RTN levels. After studying the bias caused by individual ANEs on the computation of the A-weighted equivalent noise levels through an expert-based dataset obtained before installing the sensor networks, this work evaluates the aggregate impact of the ANEs on the RTN measurements in a real-operation environment. To that effect, 304 h and 20 min of labeled acoustic data collected through the two WASNs deployed in both pilot areas have been analyzed, computing the individual and aggregate impacts of ANEs for each sensor location and impact range (low, medium and high) for a 5 min integration time. The study shows the regular occurrence of ANEs when monitoring RTN levels in both acoustic environments, which are especially common in the urban area. Moreover, the results reveal that the aggregate contribution of low- and medium-impact ANEs can become as critical as the presence of high-impact individual ANEs, thus highlighting the importance of their automatic removal to obtain reliable WASN-based RTN maps in real-operation environments.

scholarly journals Combining VR Visualization and Sonification for Immersive Exploration of Urban Noise Standards

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Berger ◽  
Ralf Bill
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Sound Propagation ◽  
Road Traffic ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Urban Traffic ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Common Noise ◽  
Noise Assessment

Urban traffic noise situations are usually visualized as conventional 2D maps or 3D scenes. These representations are indispensable tools to inform decision makers and citizens about issues of health, safety, and quality of life but require expert knowledge in order to be properly understood and put into context. The subjectivity of how we perceive noise as well as the inaccuracies in common noise calculation standards are rarely represented. We present a virtual reality application that seeks to offer an audiovisual glimpse into the background workings of one of these standards, by employing a multisensory, immersive analytics approach that allows users to interactively explore and listen to an approximate rendering of the data in the same environment that the noise simulation occurs in. In order for this approach to be useful, it should manage complicated noise level calculations in a real time environment and run on commodity low-cost VR hardware. In a prototypical implementation, we utilized simple VR interactions common to current mobile VR headsets and combined them with techniques from data visualization and sonification to allow users to explore road traffic noise in an immersive real-time urban environment. The noise levels were calculated over CityGML LoD2 building geometries, in accordance with Common Noise Assessment Methods in Europe (CNOSSOS-EU) sound propagation methods.

scholarly journals Low-Cost WASN for Real-Time Soundmap Generation

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Gerardo José Ginovart-Panisello ◽  
Ester Vidaña-Vila ◽  
Selene Caro-Via ◽  
Carme Martínez-Suquía ◽  
Marc Freixes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Road Traffic ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Changing Patterns ◽  
Real Scenario

Recent advances in technology have enabled the development of affordable low-cost acoustic monitoring systems, as a response of several fields of application that require a close acoustic analysis in real-time: road traffic noise in crowded cities, biodiversity conservation in natural parks, behavioural tracking in the elderly living alone and even surveillance in public places for safety reasons. This paper presents a low-cost wireless acoustic sensor network developed to gather acoustic data to build a 24/7 real-time soundmap. Each node of the network comprises an omnidirectional microphone and a computation unit, which processes acoustic information locally to obtain nonsensitive data (i.e., equivalent continuous loudness levels or acoustic event labels) that are sent to a cloud server. Moreover, it has also been studied the placement of the acoustic sensors in a real scenario, following acoustics criteria. The ultimate goal of the deployed system is to enable the following functions: (i) to measure the Leq in real-time in a predefined window, (ii) to identify changing patterns in the previous measurements so that anomalous situations can be detected and (iii) to prevent and attend potential irregular situations. The proposed network aims to encourage the use of real-time non-invasive devices to obtain behavioural and environmental information, in order to take decisions in real-time.

scholarly journals An Anomalous Noise Events Detector for Dynamic Road Traffic Noise Mapping in Real-Life Urban and Suburban Environments

Sensors ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 2323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Socoró ◽  
Francesc Alías ◽  
Rosa Alsina-Pagès
Keyword(s):  
Road Traffic ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Noise Mapping

scholarly journals MODELLING URBAN NOISE IN CITYGML ADE: CASE OF THE NETHERLANDS

2017 ◽  
Vol IV-4/W5 ◽  
pp. 73-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Kumar ◽  
H. Ledoux ◽  
T. J. F. Commandeur ◽  
J. E. Stoter
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Input Data ◽  
Road Traffic ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Environmental Noise ◽  
Motor Vehicles ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Noise Levels ◽  
Noise Mapping ◽  
Urban Noise

Road traffic and industrial noise has become a major source of discomfort and annoyance among the residents in urban areas. More than 44 % of the EU population is regularly exposed to road traffic noise levels over 55 dB, which is currently the maximum accepted value prescribed by the Environmental Noise Directive for road traffic noise. With continuously increasing population and number of motor vehicles and industries, it is very unlikely to hope for noise levels to diminish in the near future. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor urban noise, so as to make mitigation plans and to deal with its adverse effects. The 2002/49/EC Environmental Noise Directive aims to determine the exposure of an individual to environmental noise through noise mapping. One of the most important steps in noise mapping is the creation of input data for simulation. At present, it is done semi-automatically (and sometimes even manually) by different companies in different ways and is very time consuming and can lead to errors in the data. In this paper, we present our approach for automatically creating input data for noise simulations. Secondly, we focus on using 3D city models for presenting the results of simulation for the noise arising from road traffic and industrial activities in urban areas. We implemented a few noise modelling standards for industrial and road traffic noise in CityGML by extending the existing Noise ADE with new objects and attributes. This research is a steping stone in the direction of standardising the input and output data for noise studies and for reconstructing the 3D data accordingly.

scholarly journals WASN-Based Day–Night Characterization of Urban Anomalous Noise Events in Narrow and Wide Streets

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (17) ◽  
pp. 4760
Author(s):  
Francesc Alías ◽  
Joan Claudi Socoró ◽  
Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Road Traffic ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Noise Mapping ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Acoustic Sensor Networks ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Acoustic Environments

In addition to air pollution, environmental noise has become one of the major hazards for citizens, being Road Traffic Noise (RTN) as its main source in urban areas. Recently, low-cost Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASNs) have become an alternative to traditional strategic noise mapping in cities. In order to monitor RTN solely, WASN-based approaches should automatize the off-line removal of those events unrelated to regular road traffic (e.g., sirens, airplanes, trams, etc.). Within the LIFE DYNAMAP project, 15 urban Anomalous Noise Events (ANEs) were described through an expert-based recording campaign. However, that work only focused on the overall analysis of the events gathered during non-sequential diurnal periods. As a step forward to characterize the temporal and local particularities of urban ANEs in real acoustic environments, this work analyses their distribution between day (06:00–22:00) and night (22:00–06:00) in narrow (1 lane) and wide (more than 1 lane) streets. The study is developed on a manually-labelled 151-h acoustic database obtained from the 24-nodes WASN deployed across DYNAMAP’s Milan pilot area during a weekday and a weekend day. Results confirm the unbalanced nature of the problem (RTN represents 83.5% of the data), while identifying 26 ANE subcategories mainly derived from pedestrians, animals, transports and industry. Their presence depends more significantly on the time period than on the street type, as most events have been observed in the day-time during the weekday, despite being especially present in narrow streets. Moreover, although ANEs show quite similar median durations regardless of time and location in general terms, they usually present higher median signal-to-noise ratios at night, mainly on the weekend, which becomes especially relevant for the WASN-based computation of equivalent RTN levels.

scholarly journals 3D noise mapping for preselected locations of urban area with and without noise barriers: A case study of Delhi, India

Noise Mapping ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-83
Author(s):  
Pervez Alam ◽  
Kafeel Ahmad ◽  
S. S. Afsar ◽  
Nasim Akhtar
Keyword(s):  
Noise Level ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Road Traffic ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Residential Building ◽  
Noise Pollution ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Noise Barriers ◽  
Noise Mapping

AbstractNoise pollution has been rising as a critical issue in recent days particularly for the people living in urban areas. This study has been conducted to find out the effects of traffic induced noise on nearby residential building through 3D noise mapping with and without noise Barriers. Monitoring has been carried out at various densely populated preselected locations of Delhi, India. Thereafter, 3D noise mapping has been done using hourly average noise levels for the locations exposed with maximum noise. The developed 3D noise map shows the variation of noise level along X, Y and Z direction for all selected locations before and after installation of noise barriers. Moreover, the result also shows that exact assessment of noise impact is possible through 3D noise mapping, when a multistory building close to the source of noise is taken into consideration. This paper also elaborates the adequate height, distance and NRC value of noise barrier to reduce the effect of road traffic noise on nearby high rise building. Reduction pattern of noise level can easily be visualized and evaluated by using these maps. This type of study could support decision makers during adaptation of suitable remedial measures.

scholarly journals 2-D noise maps for tier-2 city urban Indian roads

Noise Mapping ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dipeshkumar R. Sonaviya ◽  
Bhaven N. Tandel
Keyword(s):  
Road Traffic ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Field Measurements ◽  
Noise Pollution ◽  
Heterogeneous Traffic ◽  
Computer Simulation Model ◽  
Road Traffic Noise ◽  
Noise Mapping ◽  
Traffic Condition ◽  
Traffic Composition

Abstract In today’s era, vehicular noise pollution has been identified as a serious danger that influence the attribute of the urban regions. To identify the influence of noise effects, noise maps are very useful. A noise mapping study has been carried out to study the propagation of urban road traffic noise in the areas along with field measurements. The computer simulation model (Sound- PLAN software) is used to developed noise maps. In developing nations like India, traffic composition is heterogeneous. These traffic compositions contain vehicles, which have different sizes, speeds variations and operating systems. Because of fluctuating speeds, deficiency of lane disciplines, and non-authorized parking on main road lanes, honking events becomes inevitable, which changes and affects the urban soundscape of nations like India. Due to horn events (heterogeneous traffic condition), noise level (LAeq) increase by 0.5–8 dB (A) as compared to homogeneous traffic conditions.

scholarly journals People exposed to traffic noise in european agglomerations from noise maps. A critical review

Noise Mapping ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Arana ◽  
Ricardo San Martin ◽  
Juan C. Salinas
Keyword(s):  
Road Traffic ◽  
Noise Source ◽  
Traffic Noise ◽  
Noise Pollution ◽  
Environmental Noise ◽  
Action Plans ◽  
Implementation Phase ◽  
Pollution Levels ◽  
Input Variables ◽  
The Impact

AbstractTwo of the main objectives of the European Directive on environmental noise are, firstly, to unify acoustic indices for assessing environmental noise and, secondly, to standardize assessment methodologies. The ultimate goal is to objectively and comparably manage the impact and evolution of environmental noise caused both by urban agglomerations and by traffic infrastructures (roads, rails and airports). The use of common indices and methodologies (together with five-year plan assessment required by the authorities in charge) should show how noise pollution levels are evolving plus the effectiveness of corrective measures implemented in the action plans. In this paper, available results fromnumerous European agglomerations (with particular emphasis on Spanish agglomerations) are compared and analysed. The impact and its evolution are based on the percentage of people exposed to noise. More specifically, it demonstrates the impact caused by road traffic, which proves to be the main noise source in all agglomerations. In many cases, the results are extremely remarkable. In some case, the results are illogical. For such cases, it can be concluded that either assessment methodologies have been signifi- cantly amended or the input variables to the calculation programs have been remarkably changed. The uncertainty associated with the results is such that, in our opinion, no conclusions can be drawn concerning the effectiveness of remedial measures designed within the action plans after the Directive’s first implementation Phase.

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