Leveraging Urban Sounds: A Commodity Multi-Microphone Hardware Approach for Sound Recognition

City noise and sound are measured and processed with the purpose of drawing appropriate government legislation and regulations, ultimately aimed at contributing to a healthier environment for humans. The primary use of urban noise analysis is carried out with the main purpose of reporting or denouncing, to the appropriate authorities, a misconduct or correct a misuse of council resources. We believe that urban sounds carry more information than what it is extracted to date. In this paper we present a cloud-based urban sound analysis system for the capturing, processing and trading of urban sound-based information. By leveraging modern artificial intelligence algorithms running on a FOG computing city infrastructure, we will show how the presented solution can offer a valuable solution for exploiting urban sound information. A specific focus is given to the hardware implementation of the sound sensor and its multimicrophone architecture. We discuss how the presented architecture is designed to allow the trading of sound information between independent parties, transparently, using cloud-based sound processing APIs running on an inexpensive consumer-grade microphone.