Drive-by large-region acoustic noise-source mapping via sparse beamforming tomography

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Acoustics
• Signal Processing

Background:

• Environmental noise poses significant risks to human health.
• Current noise monitoring methods are often impractical for city-wide applications due to dense measurement requirements.
• There is a need for efficient and scalable noise-monitoring solutions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an alternative, efficient method for large-scale environmental noise monitoring.
• To create a system capable of generating two-dimensional acoustic tomographic maps of noise sources.
• To assess the feasibility of using a moving vehicle with a microphone array for noise mapping.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a microphone array mounted on a moving vehicle.
• Employed far-field frequency-domain delay-and-sum beamforming to process acoustic data.
• Generated two-dimensional acoustic tomographic maps from sparse measurements.
• Validated the method using pre-recorded noise sources in a controlled field experiment.

Main Results:

• The proposed method successfully generated acoustic tomographic maps.
• The system accurately identified the locations and sound pressure levels (SPLs) of noise sources.
• Experimental results demonstrated the accuracy of the tomographic imaging.

Conclusions:

• The vehicle-mounted microphone array approach offers a promising solution for rapid and low-cost environmental noise monitoring.
• This method overcomes the limitations of traditional dense-grid measurements for urban noise mapping.
• The findings support the potential for widespread adoption in environmental noise assessment.