Sound analysis in smart cities

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of smart cities and discusses the importance of sound as a source of information about urban life. It describes a wide range of applications for the computational analysis of urban sounds and focuses on two high-impact areas, audio surveillance, and noise pollution monitoring, which sit at the intersection of dense sensor networks and machine listening. For sensor networks we focus on the pros and cons of mobile versus static sensing strategies, and the description of a low-cost solution to acoustic sensing that supports distributed machine listening. For sound event detection and classification we focus on the challenges presented by this task, solutions including feature design and learning strategies, and how a combination of convolutional networks and data augmentation result in the current state of the art. We close with a discussion about the potential and challenges of mobile sensing, the limitations imposed by the data currently available for research, and a few areas for future exploration.