Gwendall Petit

Noise mapping based on participative measurements

Abstract The high temporal and spatial granularities recommended by the European regulation for the purpose of environmental noise mapping leads to consider new alternatives to simulations for reaching such information. While more and more European cities deploy urban environmental observatories, the ceaseless rising number of citizens equipped with both a geographical positioning system and environmental sensors through their smartphones legitimates the design of outsourced systems that promote citizen participatory sensing. In this context, the OnoM@p system aims at offering a framework for capitalizing on crowd noise data recorded by inexperienced individuals by means of an especially designed mobile phone application. The system fully rests upon open source tools and interoperability standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Moreover, the implementation of the Spatial Data Infrastructure principle enables to break up as services the various business modules for acquiring, analysing and mapping sound levels. The proposed architecture rests on outsourced processes able to filter outlier sensors and untrustworthy data, to cross- reference geolocalised noise measurements with both geographical and statistical data in order to provide higherlevel indicators, and to map the collected and processed data based on web services.

Noise mapping based on participative measurements with a smartphone

Because noise is a major pollution leading to non-negligible socio-economical impacts, many national regulations aim at reducing the population noise exposure. Within the context of the European directive 2002/49/EC, a special attention is paid to the evaluation of the existing noise environment. Nowadays, this assessment is addressed based on simulated noise maps, which however present some limitations due to the simplification of noise generation and propagation phenomena. Smartphone participative measurements are alternatively being developed, offering the high temporal and spatial granularities recommended by the EU directive. However, the existing approaches often lack a quantification of the produced noise maps accuracy, and are rarely user-oriented. In this context, within the framework of the EU project ENERGIC-OD, a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI “OnoMap”) has been developed to manage smartphones measurements using a dedicated Android application (“NoiseCapture”) and to produce relevant noise m...

Collaborative noise data collected from smartphones

Noise stands for an important human health and environmental issue. Indeed, noise causes annoyance and fatigue, interferes with communication and sleep, damages hearing and entails cardiovascular problems (WHO, 2011) [1]. From an environmental point of view, noise implies a lessening of both the richness and abundance of the animal species, an alteration of the communication, which can threaten the reproduction and predation, etc. (Newport et al., 2014; Shannon et al., 2014) [2], [3]. Consequently, effects related to environmental noise result in a huge cost for society, with 2.2 billion euros in France, for example, for the year 2013 (Bourges and Diel, 2015) [4]. In this context, the reduction of noise in the environment is a burning issue, which requires, firstly, carrying out an evaluation of noise in the environment, and secondly, to establish action plans to reduce noise annoyance. With the development of the concept of participatory measurement, and considering the extremely large number of people equipped with a smartphone while being in mobility, the use of smartphones is potentially a relevant solution to realize a large-scale environmental noise evaluation. The data presented hereinafter are collected from the Android NoiseCapture application and shared from the OnoMap Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The NoiseCapture approach consists in measuring noise along a path, and then to share data with the community. This approach has been developed within the framework of the European ENERGIC-OD1 project, which aims at deploying a set of Virtual Hubs (VH) to share heterogeneous data with third parties, in respect with the European INSPIRE, and at developing new and original services that can be useful for the community. The noise data that are acquired by volunteers around the world (citizen observations), are organized in three files, containing the path of measures (a set of points), standardized noise indicators, noise description and other useful variables (GPS accuracy, speed…). These data can be very relevant later to propose an environmental noise evaluation, through simple or complex treatments.