COLLABORATIVE NOISE MAPPING USING SMARTPHONE

Abstract. Noise pollution is considered to be one of the most prevalent environmental challenges affecting human health. Noise pollution is increasing in cities needing techniques to monitor and predict the noise. The monitoring of traffic noise levels in different parts of the cities at different times has become very difficult due to logistic constraints. It is thus required to measure the noise levels at certain strategic locations, such as, near the noise sources (e.g., roads), and then to utilize it to predict the noise levels at surrounding locations. The challenge of monitoring the noise near several road crossings in a city can be reduced using a smartphone-based noise monitoring technique. However, the prediction of noise levels and showcase it as maps require terrain data, noise data, and noise prediction models. The requirement of terrain data can be met using open-source terrain data, from which various terrain parameters can be extracted and integrated with a standard prediction model on the web platform to predict the noise map for an area. Smartphone-based noise monitoring and its subsequent mapping can be a very popular and effective option, which uses a crowdsourcing approach. The entire methodology is tried to be applied over Lucknow city in India. Noise levels are monitored at three different slots, daily, over 14 road crossings using the smartphone-based app. Further, collected noise levels were calibrated against standard noise meter to ascertain accurate noise levels for these locations. Thereafter, three categories of noise environments are chosen from it and mapped using open-source satellite images and standard noise models, over the web on the GIS platform. The predicted noise levels on the maps were verified with the recorded noise data from similar locations using standard noise meter. For these three crossings at different times the predictions are found to be accurate within ±4.5 dB.