Special Issue "Sound Monitoring Acoustic Sensor Network Design for Urban and Suburban Environments"
A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Intelligent Sensors".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2021.
Special Issue Editors
Interests: acoustic event detection; real-time signal processing; adaptive signal processing; noise monitoring; noise annoyance; impact of noise events
Special Issues and Collections in MDPI journals
Interests: sound; acoustics; acoustic analysis; acoustic signal processing; noise analysis; sound analysis; consulting; wave propagation; audio signal processing; psychoacoustics; soundscape
Special Issues and Collections in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The Environmental Noise Directive (END) requires that a five-year updating of noise maps is carried out, to check and report on changes that have occurred during the reference period. This led last year’s END to deploy several wireless acoustic sensor networks to improve evaluation of the impact of road traffic noise in the cities around the world. Nevertheless, the END opens the door to the analysis of sound taking into account its source. Annoyance is closely related to both the LAeq value (the equivalent value) of a sound and the type of sound (e.g., road traffic noise, music, birdsong, sirens, alarms, works...). Thus, a new generation of acoustic sensor networks should be designed, in order to come a step closer to sound mapping. So far, several noise mapping sensors, networks and platforms have been developed and deployed in some cities and suburban environments. This new approach is devoted to sound, and not just noise (which is usually limited to non-desired sounds). This new wireless acoustic sensor network requires broad knowledge in several disciplines: accurate hardware design for the acoustic sensors; artificial intelligence algorithms to differentiate the sources of noise; network structure design; information management, and graphical user interface design to communicate the results to users. This Special Issue focuses on all the technologies necessary for development of an efficient wireless acoustic sensor network, from the early design stages through to deployment testing, performance, and policy implications. This Special Issue, prepared by two guest editors, describes the latest trends in worldwide WASN design projects aimed at the design and implementation of smart acoustic sensor networks. The focus of the contributions is on good practice, suitable for the design and deployment of intelligent networks in other locations.
Dr. Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès
Dr. Giovanni Zambon
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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Planned Papers
The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.
Title: Memetic chains for improving the Local Wireless Sensor Networks Localization in Urban Scenarios
Authors: Hilde Pérez García
Affiliation: Universidad de León
Abstract: Local Positioning Systems (LPS) are supposing an active field of research in the last few years. Its application in harsh environments for high-demanded accuracy applications is allowing the development of technological activities such as autonomous navigation, indoor localization or low-level flights in restricted environments. LPS consists of ad-hoc deployments of sensors which meets the design requirements of each activity. Among LPS, those based on temporal measurements are attracting the higher interest due to their trade-off among accuracy, robustness, availability and costs. The Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) is extended in the literature for LPS applications and consequently we perform, in this paper, an analysis of the optimal sensor deployment of this architecture for achieving practical results. This is known as the Node Location Problem (NLP) and has been categorized as NP-Hard. Therefore, heuristic solutions such as Genetic Algorithms (GA) or Memetic Algorithms (MA) have been applied in the literature for the NLP. In this paper, we introduce an adaptation of the so-called MA-SW-Chains for its application in the large-scale discrete discontinuous optimization of the NLP in urban scenarios. Our proposed algorithm (MA-VND-Chains) outperforms the GA and the MA of previous proposals for the NLP by 17% and 10% respectively in the accuracy achieved by the TDOA architecture in the urban scenario introduced.
Title: Validation of low-cost pavement monitoring inertial sensor for urban road networks
Authors: Giuseppe Loprencipe
Affiliation: DICEA, Department of Civil, Constructional and Environmental Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Eudossiana, 18 00184 Rome, Italy
Abstract: Road networks are continuously monitored to evaluate their decay level. Pavement roughness is one of the parameters of road quality that can be measured and it affecting ride quality, driving safety, and fuel consumption. Many reliable systems were developed to measure accurately pavement roughness by means of the longitudinal profiles named profilometers. These devices are mainly used on suburban roads. There is a lack of devices for measuring pavement roughness on urban roads. In the last 10 years, devices and procedures that use an indirect assessment of pavement roughness through the measurement of accelerations inside a moving vehicle have been developed.
These measurements can be performed indifferently with specially made systems by putting together an accelerometer and a GPS or using the same sensors available in smartphones. In this study, a vibration-based system is developed by using a low-cost three-axis Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems accelerometer and a Global Positioning System instrument, which are connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero board and embedded inside a vehicle to monitor indirectly the road condition. To assess the level of pavement decay, the comfort index awz defined by the ISO26131 standard was considered.
Considering 25 km of roads, with different levels of pavement decay, validation measures made using the proposed sensor, a pre-assembled inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a Road Surface Profiler (RSP) were performed. Therefore, comparisons between awzs determined with accelerations measured on the proposed sensor and ones of the other more expensive IMU are made; in addition, also correlations between awz and International Roughness Index and Ride Number determined using the proposed sensor and the RSP were performed. The results were shown very good correlations between the awz calculated with the sensor proposed and ones in the other IMU. In addition, the correlations between awz and IRI and RN were showed promising results, considering the use of the proposed sensor as a reliable method to assess the pavements decay in road networks where the use of traditional systems is complicated and/or not cheap.