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Smartphone tuning for accurate ambient noise assessment

Abstract:

In the past decade smartphones have experienced unprecedented adoption, being nowadays considered ubiquitous. In parallel, their complexity has also increased significantly since current devices are endowed with different types of sensors, thereby having multiple sensing capabilities. By combining the data gathered by different smartphones it is possible to achieve the monitoring of any region of interest with a high spatial and temporal granularity, thereby embracing the crowdsensing paradigm. In this paper we move in this direction by tuning smartphones so that they become accurate noise-sensing units. In particular, our focus is on the processes of sound capture and sound processing, determining the impact of different noise calculation approaches on the noise estimation accuracy; the latter is obtained through comparison against a professional noise sensing device. Through real experiments we find that, with a proper tuning, it is possible to achieve noise measurements in the entire dynamic range of typical smartphones (35 to 95 dB SPL) with an accuracy comparable to that of professional devices.