Design of a low-cost configurable acoustic sensor for the rapid development of sound recognition applications

Concerned about the noise pollution in urban environments, the European Commission (EC) has created an Environmental Noise Directive 2002/49/EC (END) requiring Member states to publish noise maps and noise management plans every five years for cities with a high density of inhabitants, major roads, railways and airports. The END also requires the noise pressure levels for these sources to be presented independently. Currently, data measurements and the representations of the noise pressure levels in such maps are performed semi-manually by experts. This process is time and cost consuming, as well as limited to presenting only a static picture of the noise levels. To overcome these issues, we propose the deployment of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks with several nodes in urban environments that can enable the generation of real-time noise level maps, as well as detect the source of the sound thanks to machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we briefly review the state of the art of the hardware used in wireless acoustic applications and propose a low-cost sensor based on an ARM cortex-A microprocessor. This node is able to process machine learning algorithms for sound source detection in-situ, allowing the deployment of highly scalable sound identification systems.