With rapid urbanisation and the accompanying increase in traffic density, traffic noise has become a major concern in urban planning. However, traditional grid noise mapping methods have limitations in terms of time consumption, software costs, and a lack of parameter integration interfaces. These limitations hinder their ability to meet the need for iterative updates and rapid performance feedback in the early design stages of street-scale urban planning. Herein, we developed a rapid urban traffic noise mapping technique that leverages generative adversarial networks (GANs) as a surrogate model. This approach enables the rapid assessment of urban traffic noise distribution by using urban elements such as roads and buildings as the input. The mean values for the mean squared error (MSE) and structural similarity index (SSIM) are 0.0949 and 0.8528, respectively, for the validation dataset. Hence, our prediction accuracy is on par with that of conventional prediction software. Furthermore, the trained model is integrated into Grasshopper as a tool, facilitating the rapid generation of traffic noise maps. This integration allows urban designers and planners, even those without expertise in acoustics, to easily anticipate changes in acoustics impacts caused by design.

As the availability, size and complexity of data have increased in recent years, machine learning (ML) techniques have become popular for modeling. Predictions resulting from applying ML models are often used for inference, decision-making, and downstream applications. A crucial yet often overlooked aspect of ML is uncertainty quantification, which can significantly impact how predictions from models are used and interpreted. Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) is one of the most popular ML methods given its simple implementation, fast computation, and sequential learning, which make its predictions highly accurate compared to other methods. However, techniques for uncertainty determination in ML models such as XGBoost have not yet been universally agreed among its varying applications. We propose enhancements to XGBoost whereby a modified quantile regression is used as the objective function to estimate uncertainty (QXGBoost). Specifically, we included the Huber norm in the quantile regression model to construct a differentiable approximation to the quantile regression error function. This key step allows XGBoost, which uses a gradient-based optimization algorithm, to make probabilistic predictions efficiently. QXGBoost was applied to create 90\% prediction intervals for one simulated dataset and one real-world environmental dataset of measured traffic noise. Our proposed method had comparable or better performance than the uncertainty estimates generated for regular and quantile light gradient boosting. For both the simulated and traffic noise datasets, the overall performance of the prediction intervals from QXGBoost were better than other models based on coverage width-based criterion.

As three of the busiest modern cities around the world, it should come as no surprise that London, New York, and Paris are buzzing with traffic noise. Now, interactive maps have been developed by climate charity Possible as part of its Car Free Cities campaign, revealing just how intense this noise can be in parts of the three cities. Unsurprisingly, areas with busy roads and those near airports tend to have the highest levels of noise pollution, while areas with large parks tend to have the lowest levels. For example, in New York, noise pollution levels are highest around John F. Kennedy International Airport and LaGuardia airport, and lowest around Central Park. Speaking to MailOnline, Hirra Khan Adeogun, Head of the Car Free Cities campaign, said: 'It's well known how mass private car ownership damages the climate and contributes to toxic air.

Road traffic noise outside schools may impair the development of a child's attention span and short-term memory. Previous studies have shown that noise pollution from road traffic can disrupt sleep and increase stress in adults. Meanwhile, local aircraft noise has been shown to reduce academic performance and reading comprehension in children. However, it wasn't known whether road traffic noise outside schools impacts cognitive development in children. To learn more, Maria Foraster at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and her colleagues recruited 2680 children aged 7 to 10 from 38 schools throughout Barcelona.

This paper is about alerting acoustic event detection and sound source localisation in an urban scenario. Specifically, we are interested in spotting the presence of horns, and sirens of emergency vehicles. In order to obtain a reliable system able to operate robustly despite the presence of traffic noise, which can be copious, unstructured and unpredictable, we propose to treat the spectrograms of incoming stereo signals as images, and apply semantic segmentation, based on a Unet architecture, to extract the target sound from the background noise. In a multi-task learning scheme, together with signal denoising, we perform acoustic event classification to identify the nature of the alerting sound. Lastly, we use the denoised signals to localise the acoustic source on the horizon plane, by regressing the direction of arrival of the sound through a CNN architecture. Our experimental evaluation shows an average classification rate of 94%, and a median absolute error on the localisation of 7.5{\deg} when operating on audio frames of 0.5s, and of 2.5{\deg} when operating on frames of 2.5s. The system offers excellent performance in particularly challenging scenarios, where the noise level is remarkably high.