Abstract
Environmental noise has become one of the principal health risks for urban dwellers and road traffic noise (RTN) is considered to be the main source of these adverse effects. To address this problem, strategic noise maps and corresponding action plans have been developed throughout Europe in recent years in response to the European Noise Directive 2002/49/EC (END), especially in populated cities. Recently, wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) have started to serve as an alternative to static noise maps to monitor urban areas by gathering environmental noise data in real time. Several studies have analysed and categorized the different acoustic environments described in the END (e.g., traffic, industrial, leisure, etc.). However, most of them have only considered the dynamic evolution of the A-weighted equivalent noise levels LAeq over different periods of time. In order to focus on the analysis of RTN solely, this paper introduces a clustering methodology to analyse and group spectro-temporal profiles of RTN collected simultaneously across an area of interest. The experiments were conducted on two acoustic databases collected during a weekday and a weekend day through WASNs deployed in the pilot areas of the LIFE+ DYNAMAP project. The results obtained show that the clustering of RTN, based on its spectro-temporal patterns, yields different solutions on weekdays and at weekends in both environments, being larger than those found in the suburban environment and lower than the number of clusters in the urban scenario.
Highlights
Giovanni ZambonEnvironmental noise has become one of the major pollutants in urban areas in recent years, having important negative effects on the quality of life of citizens [1,2]
The proposed clustering and analysis methodology was applied to two acoustic environments and two types of day from the DYNAMAP project
As can be seen in the left-most graph of Figure 4a, a significant increase of the measured energy was observed at 13:00 and 15:00, which was more prominent at high frequencies. This was mainly caused by a rain episode during the weekend, which was confirmed by the ANE labels
Summary
Giovanni ZambonEnvironmental noise has become one of the major pollutants in urban areas in recent years, having important negative effects on the quality of life of citizens [1,2]. The main goal of these regulations is to address the effects of environmental noise by requiring European member states to determine noise exposure, inform affected citizens and provide support to competent authorities to prevent and reduce environmental noise if required For this purpose, both noise maps and action plans have to be developed every five years for large agglomerations, according to the END legislation. The development of wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) has provided information about environmental noise in real-time through low-cost multi-sensor networks deployed in smart cities (see [6] and references ), improving the amount of data collected and available for the competent authorities In this context, the LIFE+ DYNAMAP project [7] has developed a WASN-based dynamic noise mapping system to represent the acoustic impact of road infrastructures in real-time in two pilot areas [8,9]: one in the city of Milan as an urban
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
