Title
RaveGuard: A Noise Monitoring Platform Using Low-End Microphones and Machine Learning.
Abstract
Urban noise is one of the most serious and underestimated environmental problems. According to the World Health Organization, noise pollution from traffic and other human activities, negatively impact the population health and life quality. Monitoring noise usually requires the use of professional and expensive instruments, called phonometers, able to accurately measure sound pressure levels. In many cases, phonometers are human-operated; therefore, periodic fine-granularity city-wide measurements are expensive. Recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) offer a window of opportunities for low-cost autonomous sound pressure meters. Such devices and platforms could enable fine time-space noise measurements throughout a city. Unfortunately, low-cost sound pressure sensors are inaccurate when compared with phonometers, experiencing a high variability in the measurements. In this paper, we present RaveGuard, an unmanned noise monitoring platform that exploits artificial intelligence strategies to improve the accuracy of low-cost devices. RaveGuard was initially deployed together with a professional phonometer for over two months in downtown Bologna, Italy, with the aim of collecting a large amount of precise noise pollution samples. The resulting datasets have been instrumental in designing InspectNoise, a library that can be exploited by IoT platforms, without the need of expensive phonometers, but obtaining a similar precision. In particular, we have applied supervised learning algorithms (adequately trained with our datasets) to reduce the accuracy gap between the professional phonometer and an IoT platform equipped with low-end devices and sensors. Results show that RaveGuard, combined with the InspectNoise library, achieves a 2.24% relative error compared to professional instruments, thus enabling low-cost unmanned city-wide noise monitoring.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.3390/s20195583
SENSORS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
noise pollution monitoring,edge computing,Internet of Things,smart city,artificial intelligence,machine learning,human-centric society
Journal
20
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
19
1424-8220
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lorenzo Monti144.14
Mattia Vincenzi200.34
Silvia Mirri323243.66
Giovanni Pau4116897.97
Paola Salomoni538955.88