Mapping Urban Environmental Noise Using Smartphones
The Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, No. 20 Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Yu Wang
Sensors 2016, 16(10), 1692; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16101692
Received: 27 June 2016
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Revised: 27 September 2016
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Accepted: 8 October 2016
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Published: 13 October 2016
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Algorithms for Mobile Sensing: from Wireless Sensor Networks to Mobile Crowd Sensing)
Noise mapping is an effective method of visualizing and accessing noise pollution. In this paper, a noise-mapping method based on smartphones to effectively and easily measure environmental noise is proposed. By using this method, a noise map of an entire area can be created using limited measurement data. To achieve the measurement with certain precision, a set of methods was designed to calibrate the smartphones. Measuring noise with mobile phones is different from the traditional static observations. The users may be moving at any time. Therefore, a method of attaching an additional microphone with a windscreen is proposed to reduce the wind effect. However, covering an entire area is impossible. Therefore, an interpolation method is needed to achieve full coverage of the area. To reduce the influence of spatial heterogeneity and improve the precision of noise mapping, a region-based noise-mapping method is proposed in this paper, which is based on the distribution of noise in different region types tagged by volunteers, to interpolate and combine them to create a noise map. To validate the effect of the method, a comparison of the interpolation results was made to analyse our method and the ordinary Kriging method. The result shows that our method is more accurate in reflecting the local distribution of noise and has better interpolation precision. We believe that the proposed noise-mapping method is a feasible and low-cost noise-mapping solution.
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Keywords:
noise map; smartphone; participatory sensing; spatial interpolation
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MDPI and ACS Style
Zuo, J.; Xia, H.; Liu, S.; Qiao, Y. Mapping Urban Environmental Noise Using Smartphones. Sensors 2016, 16, 1692. https://doi.org/10.3390/s16101692
AMA Style
Zuo J, Xia H, Liu S, Qiao Y. Mapping Urban Environmental Noise Using Smartphones. Sensors. 2016; 16(10):1692. https://doi.org/10.3390/s16101692
Chicago/Turabian StyleZuo, Jinbo, Hao Xia, Shuo Liu, and Yanyou Qiao. 2016. "Mapping Urban Environmental Noise Using Smartphones" Sensors 16, no. 10: 1692. https://doi.org/10.3390/s16101692
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