Acoustic Sensing Systems and Their Applications in Smart Environments

Dear Colleagues,

Recently, several sensing and monitoring technologies have been developed for indoor and outdoor applications that will improve people’s quality of life. The “smart city” paradigm is one major area of application of such technologies, as they may be used in the efficient management of public resources (e.g., water, waste, lighting), road traffic, and environmental pollution (e.g., CO, CO₂, NO₂). Ambient assisted living (AAL) is another noteworthy area of application, involving camera-based surveillance systems or daily-life activity monitoring for the elderly or people with special needs.

This Special Issue is focused on the recent advances in the development of acoustic sensing systems and their applications in smart environments, considering applications ranging from urban traffic noise monitoring to acoustic surveillance systems at home for pseudodependent people. All stages in the development of acoustic sensing systems will be considered, from their early design stage to their deployment and performance evaluation. Of special interest is the integration of acoustic sensing systems in information and management systems for applications such as (i) environmental noise monitoring to address the requirements of current legislation or regulatory bodies, such as the European Environmental Noise Directive or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; (ii) acoustic surveillance to identify and localize hazardous situations (e.g., gunshots, explosions, shouts, car skids and crashes); (iii) the design and development of acoustic signal processing and machine listening/hearing techniques—including deep learning approaches—to detect, localize, classify or measure the acoustic scenes and their sound sources; (iv) the creation of acoustic datasets developed for specific acoustic sensing systems and applications; (iv) the design and deployment of wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs), as well as their hardware components (e.g., the low-cost acoustic sensors composing the network nodes, the collection and communication of the acoustic data) and their integration in the corresponding information management systems or central servers. These possible applications can be found indoors (e.g., in smart homes equipped with surveillance or behavioral tracking systems) or outdoors (e.g., traffic noise mapping, leisure noise mapping, biodiversity study).

Prof. Dr. Francesc Alías
Dr. Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès
Guest Editors

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