A Distributed Sensor Network for Monitoring Noise Level and Noise Sources in Urban Environments

Smart city applications for acoustic monitoring become essential to cope with the overall increasing noise pollution in urban environments. This paper gives an overview over a distributed sensor network for noise monitoring in the German city of Jena. Several acoustic sensor units allow for classifying among various acoustic scenes and events using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and measuring different noise level parameters. Connected by a communication system based on MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport), these sensors communicate measurement data to a central server for data postprocessing and storage. Finally, a web-based application allows for various real-time visualizations of noise exposure distributed over the city.