Extracting Urban Sound Information for Residential Areas in Smart Cities Using an End-to-End IoT System

Abstract: With rapid urbanization comes the increase of community, construction, and transportation noise in residential areas. The conventional approach of solely relying on sound pressure level (SPL) information to decide on the noise environment and to plan out noise control and mitigation strategies is inadequate. This paper presents an end-to-end IoT system that extracts real-time urban sound metadata using edge devices, providing information on the sound type, location and duration, rate of occurrence, loudness, and azimuth of a dominant noise in nine residential areas. The collected metadata on environmental sound is transmitted to and aggregated in a cloud-based platform to produce detailed descriptive analytics and visualization. Our approach to integrating different building blocks, namely, hardware, software, cloud technologies, and signal processing algorithms to form our real-time IoT system is outlined. We demonstrate how some of the sound metadata extracted by our system are used to provide insights into the noise in residential areas. A scalable workflow to collect and prepare audio recordings from nine residential areas to construct our urban sound dataset for training and evaluating a location-agnostic model is discussed. Some practical challenges of managing and maintaining a sensor network deployed at numerous locations are also addressed.