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The investigated manuscript is devoted to the study of the dengue epidemic model. Generally, the infection of dengue occurs in extremely hot and humid conditions where the transmission and control depend on many factors like information intervention, humid weather, etc. With the help of the deterministic dengue model, we have taken the stochastic perturbed dengue model along with the factor of information intervention. The qualitative analysis for the positive solution of the stochastic differential equation based model is built. The scheme for basic reproduction number introduced for sure exponential stability by constructing the Lyapunov function. For the validity of our obtained results, we have simulated the proposed scheme and compare the stochastic model with its corresponding deterministic version.

Background The acoustic adaptation hypothesis (AAH) states that signals should evolve towards an optimal transmission of the intended information from senders to intended receivers given the environmental constraints of the medium that they traverse. To date, most AAH studies have focused on the effect of stratified vegetation on signal propagation. These studies, based on the AAH, predict that acoustic signals should experience less attenuation and degradation where habitats are less acoustically complex. Here, we explored this effect by including an environmental noise dimension to test some AAH predictions in two clades of widespread amphibians (Bufonidae and Ranidae) that actively use acoustic signals for communication. By using data from 106 species in these clades, we focused on the characterization of the differences in dominant frequency (DF) and frequency contour (i.e., frequency modulation [FM] and harmonic performances) of mating calls and compared them between species that inhabit flowing-water or still-water environments. Results After including temperature, body size, habitat type and phylogenetic relationships, we found that DF differences among species were explained mostly by body size and habitat structure. We also showed that species living in lentic habitats tend to have advertisement calls characterized by well-defined FM and harmonics. Likewise, our results suggest that flowing-water habitats can constrain the evolutionary trajectories of the frequency-contour traits of advertisement calls in these anurans. Conclusions Our results may support AAH predictions in frogs that vocalize in noisy habitats because flowing-water environments often produce persistent ambient noise. For instance, these anurans tend to generate vocalizations with less well-defined FM and harmonic traits. These findings may help us understand how noise in the environment can influence natural selection as it shapes acoustic signals in affected species.

Metro has become one of the most used means among public transit due to its advantages such as mass transit capacity, safety, fast speed, and comfort. Despite its benefits, workers and passengers ride the metro daily, and they are continuously being exposed to a high level of noise. Noise exposure has been related to various health-related issues. This paper presents an evaluation of the acoustic environment at the station’s platform and studies factors affecting the platform’s noise levels. Greater Cairo Metro Line 1, 2, and 3 have been selected as a case study. The result indicates that noise levels are unacceptable compared with the international standards of noise exposure as the highest measured noise level at station platforms was 93.93 dB(A). Regarding the rolling stocks type, the L Aeq was different from one type to another, with a range of 2.28 to 6.5 dB(A). The L Aeq on the underground platforms station was 11 dB(A) higher than on the surface stations regarding the station type. For underground stations, the L Aeq on curved platforms higher than the straight platforms when a train arrived, stop and go from the station with a range of 2.7 to 4.9 dB(A). Regarding the station platform dimension, the L Aeq on the underground platforms with a 5 m width is higher than the one with a 3 m width by 3 dB(A).

Ship radiated noise denoising is the basis and premise of underwater acoustic signal processing. To obtain better denoising effect, a new denoising method for ship radiated noise based on Spearman variational mode decomposition (SVMD), spatial-dependence recurrence sample entropy (SdrSampEn), improved wavelet threshold denoising (IWTD) and Savitzky-Golay filter (SG) is proposed. Firstly, SVMD is proposed, ship radiated noise is decomposed a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by SVMD, and the SdrSampEn value of every IMF is counted. Then, according to the SdrSampEn value, these IMFs are divided into noise-dominated IMFs and real signal-dominated IMFs. Noise-dominated IMFs are denoised by IWTD, and real signal-dominated IMFs are denoised by SG. Finally, the processed IMFs are reconstructed, and the noise-reduced signal is acquired. The proposed method has three main advantages: (i) compared with empirical mode decomposition (EMD), variational mode decomposition (VMD) as a new non-recursive decomposition algorithm, overcomes the defect of mode mixing; (ii) the proposed SVMD method overcomes the problem that VMD needs to preset the number of decomposition levels K; (iii) real signal-dominated IMFs have also been denoised and the method improves signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by 2 dB to 4 dB. The denoising experiments with the Lorenz signal and the Chen signal show that the proposed method can improve the SNR by 8 dB to 13 dB. Applying the proposed method to denoise ship radiated noise from the official website of National Park Administration ( https://www.nps.gov/glba/learn/nature/soundclips.htm ), the results show that the proposed method makes chaotic attractor phase waveform clearer and smoother, and can effective restrain marine environmental noise in ship radiated noise.

Noise pollution is a growing problem across the world and one which many people may not be aware of the impacts on their health. The environmental noise, and in particular the road traffic noise, remains a major environmental problem affecting the health and well-being of millions of people. With this background, a comprehensive ‘noise pollution assessment study’ was undertaken for a busy traffic corridor of Ahmedabad city of India. The traffic corridor which spans around 22.25 km passes through a mix of different areas like educational, commercials and residential. A two week long field survey was carried out on this corridor during 10-23 May, 2018 at 24 locations spread over the entire corridor. The assessment reveals that the average noise level always exceeded the prescribed guidelines of World Health Organization (WHO) for the daytime noise (75 dB (A) for Industrial area, 65 dB (A) for Commercial area, 55 dB (A) for Residential area and 50 dB (A) for Silence zones), which is quite alarming. For a major portion of the traffic corridor (79.6%), even the minimum noise level was above the permissible average noise level which is a matter of great concern. The highest noise level observed was 86.0 dB (A). Clubbing the ranks of the traffic corridor segments for the noise indicators like LAeq, Lmin, Lmax, L90, L50, L10 and LNP revealed that locations like Akhbarnagar followed by Naranpura were in the nosiest. Looking to implications of the high noise levels on the human health and productivity, it is important to initiate suitable mitigation measures. The present comprehensive study brings forth the spatial and quantitative aspects of noise pollution across the busy corridor of the city which would be of great help to the civic administration in understanding the magnitude of the problem and subsequently initiate suitable mitigative measures.

In this paper, we present a ratio-dependent community dynamics model on Batesian mimicry. In ecology, Batesian mimicry is very important which focus mainly on the patterns in model-species and the mimic-species. Here, we study a stochastically forced basic model-mimic community dynamics model. Without any environmental noise, both model-species and mimic-species can survive. However, external noises push the model-species to extinct and only mimic-species can stable. We discuss a mechanism of the noise-induced transition in the basin of attraction of a stable interior equilibrium point. We apply the stochastic sensitivity function technique to construct a confidence domain near a stable interior equilibrium point and study different noise intensity for the transition.

“Smart city”, driven by digital technology is not only a technological but also a social, cultural and political project. A socially and culturally significant new urban ideal is born. This research paper is based on the narrative that the city appears as a palimpsest of interventions of all natures. History and shared memory, composition and superimposition, coherence and divergence are fundamental for its evolution. It is thus evident that ”Smart city” as a rather new urban ideal, but also as a disruptive innovation process, cannot be conceived nor implemented all at once, it must follow analogous processes of buildup and stratification. On the other hand, sounds are part of cities, of their sensory landscape, of their identity. They are one of the urban markers, along with the visual landscape. In this context, the paper focuses on the sound identity of the inner-city areas of the Mediterranean metropolis, posing the following research question: What are the transformations that “Smart city” can cause to the sound identity of a city? In dense urban fabric with high-rise buildings, high rates of exploitation, frequent transgressions of the legal construction and least free space in private plots, what can be the prospects of using “smart transport”, for enriching the city with positive soundscapes, thus improving its environmental quality? Following the metaphor of urban and acoustic palimpsest, we examine narratives of replacement of conventional cars with autonomous vehicles (AVs) and of private cars with car-pooling systems. The article concludes that spatialized intelligence can substantially and positively transform the sound identity of the Mediterranean metropolis and be the spearhead for an increase in bio-cultural sonic diversity. At least during the era when the city still appears as a palimpsest of interpositions, evoking the historic time.

Graphical abstract Environmental noise has been growing in recent years, causing numerous health problems. Highly sensitive environments such as hospitals deserve special attention, since noise can aggravate patients’ health issues and impair the performance of healthcare professionals. This work consists of a systematic review of scientific articles describing environmental noise measurements taken in hospitals between the years 2015 and 2020. The researchers started with a consultation of three databases, namely, Scopus, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect. The results indicate that for the most part, these studies are published in journals in the fields of medicine, engineering, environmental sciences, acoustics, and nursing and that most of their authors work in the fields of architecture, engineering, medicine, and nursing. These studies, which are concentrated in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, use as reference values sound levels recommended by the World Health Organization. Leq measured in hospital environments showed daytime values ranging from 37 to 88.6 dB (A) and nighttime values of 38.7 to 68.8 dB (A). Leq values for outdoor noise were 74.3 and 56.6 dB (A) for daytime and nighttime, respectively. The measurements were taken mainly inside hospitals, prioritizing more sensitive departments such as intensive care units. There is a potential for growth in work carried out in this area, but research should also include discussions about guidelines for improvement measures aimed at reducing noise in hospitals.

The recent expansion of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in urban cities has led to possibility of generation of large amounts of information data from the environmental monitoring systems among which one of the most concerning is the excessive urban noise pollution. As opposed to the conventional noise mapping procedures that involve costly and time-consuming measurement process with a traditional high-priced noise level meter, the low-cost wireless sensor networks provide a method for achieving data collection and analysis with a higher level of granularity. Тhis paper presents a wireless noise sensor unit design for continuous environmental noise level monitoring as a framework for the realization of the Internet of Things (IoT) and „Smart city” concept. The concept involves the complete noise data information system, from sensor structure to data visualization and data analysis. The overall design, characteristics and performance of the sensing system for continuous measuring urban noise pollution is discussed.

Environmental noise affects life and health within urban environments through interfering with sleep, rest, study and personal communication. Noise mapping is an important issue of local authorities but due to its requirements (staff, costs and frequency), the available data are limited or outdated. Our aim was to involve people with smartphones in the mapping process and to determine the accuracy of the measurements performed with these devices in a natural environment. The main questions were whether the measured data were dependent on the type of applied software and smartphones. We tested three software (Noise Watch, Noise Meter and Sound Level Meter) and 12 different smartphones. We evaluated the measurements with hypothesis testing and correlation analysis. Although the accuracy of smartphones was below the professional equipment, measurements can be conducted easily due to their availability; thus, a reliability analysis is important. We found that comparison between professional devices and smartphones in a laboratory was misleading as it lacks the environmental factors biasing the measurements. The best method to compare the measurements carried out with smartphones and professional Noise Meters was to use large number of measuring points in a heterogenic outdoor environment where the noise ranged from the low to large values. We revealed that both the applied software and smartphones have relevant effect on the measurements, and, although it is possible to use these devices for noise mapping, one should consider not to apply different software and smartphones. Accordingly, crowdsourcing is not a reliable data collection method because: (1) measurements should be supervised, (2) smartphones’ accuracy should be tested and (3) measurement circumstances should be the same. If any of these requirements are violated, the quality of the resulting maps can be questioned.

The aim of this study is to identify and highlight the positive and negative indirect environmental impacts of COVID-19, with a particular focus on the most affected economies (USA, China, Spain, and Italy). In this respect, the empirical and theoretical dimensions of the contents of those impacts are analyzed. Research findings reveal a significant relationship between contingency actions and positive indirect impacts such as air quality improvements, clean beaches, and the decline in environmental noise. Besides, negative indirect impacts also exist, such as the rise in waste level and curtailment in recycling, further threatening the physical spaces (land and water), besides air. It is expected that global businesses will revive in the near future (though slowly), but the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions during this short time span is not a sustainable way of environmental mitigation. Thus, long-term mitigation policies should be strengthened to cope with the undesirable deterioration of the environment. Research findings provide an up-to-date glimpse of the pandemic from the perspectives of current and future indirect environmental impacts and the post-pandemic situation. Finally, it is suggested to invent and prepare action plans to induce a sustainable economic and environmental future in the post-pandemic world scenario.

Our ecosystem is full of various types of food chain systems. Most of the species have more than one food source with various kinds of possible interactions. In this work, we have studied a predator-prey-subsidy model in a rapidly fluctuating environment. As per our consideration predator exploits both a prey population and an allochthonous resource which is provided as a subsidy to the system exogenously, with Holling Type II response functions. Furthermore, we have introduced Gaussian white noise to the main parameters subject to coupling of a prey-predator pair with its environment. We have examined the existence of unique global positive solutions for both the deterministic and stochastic systems. Boundedness, uniform continuity, global attractiveness in mean of solutions of the stochastic system are proved. Conditions for extinction of prey and predator population are derived and the importance of environmental noise as well as subsidy for extinction is discussed through mathematical results and numerical findings. We have derived conditions for persistence of the proposed stochastic system. The results of persistence and extinction have been justified by numerical simulations. Numerically we have found that presence of subsidy can be the cause of survival of predator even there is no prey available for consumption which fact is different from the studies of those systems where additional food is provided for predator. We have also observed that very high input of subsidy can be a cause for extinction of prey population.

The COVID-19 lockdown created a new kind of environment both in the UK and globally, never experienced before or likely to occur again. A vital and time-critical working group was formed with the aim of gathering crowd-source high quality baseline noise levels and other supporting information across the UK during the lock-down and subsequent periods. The acoustic community were mobilised through existing networks engaging private companies, public organisations and academics to gather data in accessible places. In addition, pre-existing on-going measurements from major infrastructure projects, airport, and planning applications were gathered to create the largest possible databank. A website was designed and developed to advertise the project, provide instructions and to formalise the uploading of noise data, observations and soundscape feedback. Two case studies gathered in the latter stage of full lockdown are presented in the paper to illustrate the changes in the environmental noise conditions relative to transport activity. Ultimately the databank will be used to establish the relation to other impacts such as air quality, air traffic, economic, and health and wellbeing. As publicly funded research the databank will be made publicly available to assist future research.

A path matched differential interferometry (PMDI) is one of the most common architectures for fiber-optic sensor arrays. It allows to interrogate many fiber-optic sensors time-multiplexed at a single fiber by using an auxiliary compensation interferometer (CIF). The CIF is typically based on an unbalanced Michelson or Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Therefore, it may be affected by different acoustic and vibration environmental noises. Any vibroacoustic impacts on the CIF might produce undesirable noises in the sensor signals and the noise performance of the measuring system will degrade. An environmental noise cancellation technique for the CIF in fiber-optic PMDI-based sensor arrays is presented in this paper. The proposed approach is based on the separate interrogation of the CIF by the additional fiber laser together with using polarization-division multiplexing. The noise cancellation is performing by the subtraction of the independent CIF’s signal from measured signals from the sensors array. In this paper, the main parameters of the noise cancellation system, which are critical for its performance, are discussed in detail. The experimental efficiency estimation of the proposed technique was performed in situ under open water conditions. It was shown, that for the measured signal with the standard deviation of 0.059 rad and the environmental impact on the CIF with the standard deviation of 0.61 rad the noise cancellation efficiency was −24.9 dB. The proposed technique might be easily integrated to large-scale PMDI-based fiber-optic sensors arrays and it’s compatible with PMDI-based Fiber Bragg Grating arrays in combination with the wavelength division multiplexing.

Strict lockdown strategies to stop the spread of COVID-19 have caused a decrease in environmental noise levels and introduced new noise conditions in dwellings. The present study has investigated the impact of the forced lockdown in Turkey on noise annoyances due to traffic, neighbors, and personal dwellings, as well as the concern of being heard by neighbors, and overall dwelling satisfaction in an online questionnaire. The stress and anxiety levels of respondents were also investigated. The survey obtained 1053 respondents. Additionally, environmental noise levels were measured over 24-h at two locations and compared with results before the pandemic. The results clearly exhibit that environmental noise levels and annoyance due to the noise levels dropped significantly. The annoyance drop was larger in previously noisier environments than previously tranquil locations. Noise annoyance due to neighbor noise did not change significantly; however, noise annoyance due to one's own dwelling increased. The results also confirmed an overall increase in dwelling satisfactions indicating a correlation between dwelling satisfaction and lower environmental noise levels. Although the results confirmed that noise annoyance was positively correlated with stress and anxiety levels, the change of annoyance between before and during lockdown was shown to be independent from the stress and anxiety level.

Dynamical characteristics of a stochastically perturbed system are drastically different from those of a deterministic system. This study deals with the dynamics of a stochastically perturbed time-variant prey–predator model of aquatic animals hilsa (prey) and eel (predator). It is a well-known fact that overfishing and indiscriminate fishing of juvenile hilsa have led to a drastic fall in its population. To save the hilsa population from becoming extinct, we equip our model with age-structured growth and harvest in hilsa and study the effect of environmental noise on both prey and predator populations. We formulate predator’s consumption using Beddington–DeAngelis functional response which also provides access to some alternative food source in the absence of prey. We obtain sufficient conditions for persistence in the mean, extinction, and global attractivity and prove stochastic ultimate boundedness and the existence of a unique positive periodic solution. We have included many numerical examples to validate the analytical results. Through global sensitivity analysis using the partial rank correlation coefficient technique, we observed the environmental noise to be of great influence on the prey–predator population.

A three-species ecological model is proposed that comprises one prey and two predators (low predator and top predator) to understand the persistence and/or extinction of prey and predators under a suitable environment. The realistic ecological system is typically inhomogeneous in terms of spatiotemporal variations of population density. With this motivation, white noise is introduced to the system to conceive the impact of environmental heterogeneity on the interaction of prey and predators. The boundedness of solutions of the system is presented. The condition for the local stability of the deterministic model is established. The stochastic analysis of the system suggests the impression of the environmental noise on the dynamical behaviour of solutions. Numerical results reveal that the proposed system exhibits an oscillatory pattern of solutions. It is shown that the white noise in the low predator has a dominating role in comparison with other noises to keep the oscillation in order. Moreover, to investigate the spatial dependency of the population density, diffusion term is introduced to the system that also displays oscillatory behaviour of the solutions. The results also confirm that the population density of prey, low predator, and top predator have a biological control in the oscillatory behaviour. In the presence of diffusion and white noise, numerical simulation illustrates the sensitivity of the diffusion coefficients and the amplitude of noises. Numerical results lead to a reasonable agreement with the analytical findings in both non-spatial and spatial systems.

In the recent years, the environmental noise is a global issue of great concern. Especially, it is considered to be one of the most deleterious environmental risk factors for the human health and well-being in urban areas. In this study, we focus on the major source of the transportation noise in the modern-day urbanized societies, which is the road traffic noise. The study was performed in the urban complex in Thessaloniki-Neapoli in Greece, and the estimation of the road traffic noise levels was based on the CoRTN (Calculation of Road Traffic Noise) prediction method. In addition, we estimated the EBD (environmental burden of disease), in terms of DALYs (disability-adjusted life years), due to the annoyance and sleep disturbances associated with the exposure to road traffic noise. The estimation of the EBD was based on the strategic noise mapping in Thessaloniki-Neapoli as well as on the guidance document produced by the WHO (World Health Organization) for the quantitative assessment on the humans' health consequences of the environmental noise. Above all, the results revealed the magnitude of the health damage caused by the transportation noise.

Understanding the emergence of coordination behavior is of paramount importance in science and engineering. Environmental noise may have important impact on the coordination. In this brief, we consider a variation of the standard Cucker-Smale system in which individuals can not measure the states of others exactly. We present sufficient conditions on group size, noise intensity and communication rate to guarantee the almost surely exponential convergence toward flocking. We challenge the prevailing paradigm that noise suppressing the emergence of collective motion and report that noise may facilitate the emergence of ordered flocking behavior. We also find that group with high density can reach the ordered state more rapidly.

Urban populations are often simultaneously exposed to air pollution and environmental noise, which are independently associated with cardiovascular disease. Few studies have examined acute physiologic responses to both air and noise pollution using personal exposure measures. We conducted a repeated measures panel study of air pollution and noise in 46 non-smoking adults in Toronto, Canada. Data were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models and weighted cumulative exposure modeling of recent exposure. We examined acute changes in cardiovascular health effects of personal (ultrafine particles, black carbon) and regional (PM2.5, NO2, O3, Ox) measurements of air pollution and the role of personal noise exposure as a confounder of these associations. We observed adverse changes in subclinical cardiovascular outcomes in response to both air pollution and noise, including changes in endothelial function and heart rate variability (HRV). Our findings show that personal noise exposures can confound associations for air pollutants, particularly with HRV, and that impacts of air pollution and noise on HRV occur soon after exposure. Thus, both noise and air pollution have a measurable impact on cardiovascular physiology. Noise should be considered alongside air pollution in future studies to elucidate the combined impacts of these exposures in urban environments.

The degradation caused by environmental noise affects the sound identities of several areas, especially at a city level, so there is a need for immediate individual and collective action. This paper focuses on the environmental noise impacts towards the soundscapes of historical landmarks located in the city of Thessaloniki (Greece). Furthermore, it offers an insight regarding a new urban quiet area attribute, since it discovers whether elevation contributes to the formation of their sound identity. The first step of this research utilized the opinion of more than 500 residents of Thessaloniki with the aid of a questionnaire, in order to highlight areas of the city&rsquo, s historic center with unique soundscapes. The resulted soundscapes were studied and analyzed by gathering both quantitative and qualitative data. Finally, these soundscapes were assessed by sound experts in order to thoroughly describe their sound identities. The Roman and Byzantine landmarks studied, being at lower and higher elevation levels, respectively, presented differentiations regarding noise levels and other soundscape characteristics. This paper proposes a new protocol, according to which the factor of elevation is worth considering during the process of identifying and utilizing urban quiet areas.

This paper proposes a stochastic model for the evolutionary adaptive dynamics of species subject to trait-dependent intrinsic growth rates and the influence of environmental noise. The aim of this paper is twofold: (a) mathematically we make an attempt to investigate the evolutionary adaptive dynamics for models with noises; (b) biologically we investigate how the noises in environment affect the evolutionary stability. We first investigate the extinction and permanence of the population in the presence of environmental noises. Combining evolutionary adaptive dynamics with stochastic dynamics, we then establish a fitness function with stochastic disturbance and obtain the evolutionary conditions for continuously stable strategy and evolutionary branching. Our study finds that under intense competition among species, increasing stochastic disturbance can lead to rapidly stable evolution towards smaller trait values, but there is an opposite effect under weak competition among species. This yields an interesting evolutionary threshold, beyond which any increasing stochastic disturbance can go against evolutionary branching and promote evolutionary stability. We then carry out the evolutionary analysis and numerical simulations to illustrate our theoretical results. Finally, for demonstrating the emergence of high-level polymorphism we perform long-term simulation of evolutionary dynamics.

There is a growing body of research indicating that drones can disturb animals. However, it is usually unclear whether the disturbance is due to visual or auditory cues. Here, we examined the effect of drone flights on the behavior of great dusky swifts Cypseloides senex and white-collared swifts Streptoprocne zonaris in 2 breeding sites where drone noise was obscured by environmental noise from waterfalls and any disturbance must be largely visual. We performed 12 experimental flights with a multirotor drone at different vertical, horizontal, and diagonal distances from the colonies. From all flights, 17% caused 50 m the disturbance percentage does not exceed 20%, at 60%. We recommend that flights with a multirotor drone during the breeding period should be conducted at a distance of >50 m and that recreational flights should be discouraged or conducted at larger distances (e.g. 100 m) in nesting birds areas such as waterfalls, canyons, and caves.

Shutting the window is usually the last resort in mitigating environmental noise, at the expense of natural ventilation. We describe an active sound control system fitted onto the opening of the domestic window that attenuates the incident sound, achieving a global reduction in the room interior while maintaining natural ventilation. The incident sound is actively attenuated by an array of control modules (a small loudspeaker) distributed optimally across the aperture. A single reference microphone provides advance information for the controller to compute the anti-noise signal input to the loudspeakers in real-time. A numerical analysis revealed that the maximum active attenuation potential outperforms the perfect acoustic insulation provided by a fully shut single-glazed window in ideal conditions. To determine the real-world performance of such an active control system, an experimental system is realized in the aperture of a full-sized window installed on a mockup room. Up to 10-dB reduction in energy-averaged sound pressure level was achieved by the active control system in the presence of a recorded real-world broadband noise. However, attenuation in the low-frequency range and its maximum power output is limited by the size of the loudspeakers. Ministry of National Development (MND) National Research Foundation (NRF) Published version This research is supported by the Singapore Ministry of National Development and the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office under the Cities of Tomorrow (CoT) Research Programme (CoT Award No. COT-V4-2019-1). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of the Singapore Ministry of National Development and National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore.

Human-generated noise pollution is of global concern, as designated by the World Health Organization ( WHO, 2011 , Burden of disease from environmental noise: Quantification of healthy life years lost in Europe. https://www.who.int/quantifying_ehimpacts/publications/e94888/en/). Increases in shipping, sonar use, pile driving, and more have all contributed to a rise in ambient underwater sound levels. Unfortunately, continuous low-intensity sounds, like shipping noise, are pervasive in shallow-shore environments where many social species live and correspond to the frequency ranges at which many fishes produce and detect acoustic stimuli. Noise has the potential to alter the sender's production of the signal, mask the signal itself (if acoustic), or change the receiver's physiology. We hypothesized that continuous tonal noise would impair social interactions and communication. To test this, we used highly social African cichlid fish, Astatotilapia burtoni, to examine inter- and intrasexual interactions that occurred in a control or noisy environment (pure tones of 100–2000 Hz). During reproductive interactions, we found that males changed the location of their courtship behaviours. Instead of producing courtship quivers (and associated sounds) immediately next to gravid females, males produced these behaviours inside their spawning shelter. This change in location decreases the likelihood of the female detecting it. Also detrimental to acoustic communication, we found that noise-exposed gravid females had lower hearing sensitivity at 100–200 Hz, a major component of male courtship sounds. In addition, males changed their visual displays during male–male territorial interactions such that they spent more time with their eyebar displayed, suggesting an increase in visual signalling. Together, these data indicate that noise may impact all three components of social communication: signal production, signal reception and the signal itself, and highlights a possible cross-modal impact of noise on visual signalling. Subtle changes to social behaviours and communication, rather than dramatic effects such as injury or mortality, are important to evaluating sublethal impacts of noise on reproductive success and species survival.

Smart water networks, created using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, have been increasingly adopted by water utilities across the world. This research focuses on the use of smart water technologies for detecting newly formed through-wall pipe cracks and leaks in water distribution systems for the purpose of pipe break early warning and prevention. This research develops easy-to-implement algorithms for analysing the hydro-acoustic vibration wave files regularly collected by permanently installed accelerometers in a water network, and for generating alarms when small leaks from developing pipe cracks are detected. Descriptive features of the historical wave files are investigated for five sites where newly-formed pipe cracks were detected nearby. It is found that the median frequency (MF) and the root-mean-square (RMS) values derived from the wave files are useful indicators for detecting new cracks and leaks. The confidence of pipe crack detection in noisy city environments can be significantly increased by windowing each already short-duration wave file into a number of frames with even shorter durations, and analysing the behaviour of the MF and RMS values of all the frames to look for the persistence of the leak feature even when part of the signal is contaminated with interference. The results show that the developed technique can robustly detect new through-wall cracks and leaks in a timely manner, and is tolerant of interference from customer water use and transient environmental noise.

Abstract Wind, a major source of environmental noise, forces invertebrates that communicate with plant-borne vibrations to adjust their signaling when communicating in windy conditions. However, the strategies that animals use to reduce the impact of wind noise on communication are not well studied. We investigated the effects of wind on the production of tremulatory signals in the neotropical katydid Copiphora brevirostris. First, we recorded katydid signaling activity and natural wind variation in the field. Additionally, we exposed katydid couples during their most active signaling time period to artificial wind of different levels, and we recorded the number of tremulations produced by the males. We found that wind levels are at their lowest between 2:00 and 5:00 in the morning, which coincides with peak signaling period for male katydids. Furthermore, we found that males produce significantly fewer tremulations when exposed to wind rather than acoustic noise or silence. Wind velocity significantly affected the number of tremulations produced during the wind treatment, with fewer tremulations produced with higher wind velocities. Our results show that katydids can time their vibratory signaling both in the short- and long-term to favorable sensory conditions, either through behavioral flexibility in response to short-term fluctuations in wind or as a result of an evolutionary process in response to predictable periods of low-wind conditions. Significance statement Animal communication can be hampered by noise across all sensory modalities. Most research on the effects of noise and the strategies to cope with it has focused on animals that use airborne sounds to communicate. However, although hundreds of thousands of invertebrates communicate with vibrational signals, we know very little about how noise affects this form of communication. For animals that rely on substrate-borne vibrations, wind represents the major source of environmental noise. Wind velocity levels can be predictable at a long-term scale (hours) but rather unpredictable at a short time scale (seconds). Both scales of variation are important for communication. Using a combination of field observations and lab experiments, we investigated the strategies used by a neotropical katydid Copiphora brevirostris to cope with vibrational noise induced by wind. Our results demonstrate that C. brevirostris times its signals at the long- and short-term range. Katydids signaled more at the times at night when wind velocity was lowest. Moreover, when exposed to wind gusts during their peak time of activity, katydids signaled more during the wind-free gaps.

Environmental noise may play a role in the manifestation and severity of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, but evidence is limited. We investigated the cross-sectional associations between residential and school road traffic noise exposure and ADHD symptoms and diagnosis. The sample included n = 1710, 10–12-year-old children from the TRAILS study in The Netherlands. ADHD symptoms were measured using a DSM-IV based subscale from the Child Behavior Checklist. Children with diagnosed ADHD originated from the clinic-referred cohort. Road traffic noise (Lden) was estimated at the residence and school level, by model calculation. Risk ratios for ADHD symptoms and ADHD diagnoses, and regression coefficients for symptom severity were estimated separately and simultaneously for residential and school road traffic noise. Adjusted multinomial models with residential road traffic noise showed that residential noise was not associated with ADHD symptoms, but was associated with lower risks for ADHD diagnosis (RR = 0.93; 95% CI 0.89, 0.97). Similar associations were observed for models including school road traffic noise and models including both exposures. No clear exposure response relationship was observed for associations between residential or school noise and ADHD symptom severity. We found no evidence for a harmful association between road traffic noise and ADHD. Associations between noise and lower risks for ADHD were observed only in referred cases with a confirmed ADHD diagnosis and may be due to residual confounding or selection bias. Future studies should focus on residential and school noise exposure, and study associations with ADHD symptoms and diagnosis over time. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00787-020-01521-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Environmental noise is unavoidable in the spread of infectious diseases. In this paper, we present a mathematical system to investigate the impact of environmental noise on disease transmission dynamics. The model incorporates Brownian noise, Markovian switching noise and nonlinear incidence. The results show that the long-term dynamics of the stochastic system is determined by a threshold parameter which is closely related to the stochastic noise. If the threshold is greater than zero all solutions converge exponentially to a unique invariant probability distribution, while if the threshold is less than zero the infectious diseases are extinct at an exponential rate and the level of susceptible individuals converges weakly to a unique invariant probability distribution. The threshold parameter also provides essential guidelines for accessing control of the diseases and implies that the environmental noise may be beneficial to contain the infectious diseases. The results extend and generalize previous work in understanding the dynamics of stochastic epidemic models with Markov switching. The theoretical approach can also be applied to the stochastic systems driven by white noise.

International audience; 6 7 Random environmental fluctuations pose major threats to wild populations. As patterns of 8 environmental noise are themselves altered by global change, there is growing need to identify 9 general mechanisms underlying their effects on population dynamics. This notably requires 10 understanding and predicting population responses to the color of environmental noise, i.e. its 11 temporal autocorrelation pattern. Here, we show experimentally that environmental 12 autocorrelation has a large influence on population dynamics and extinction rates, which can be 13 predicted accurately provided that a memory of past environment is accounted for. We exposed 14 near to 1000 lines of the microalgae Dunaliella salina to randomly fluctuating salinity, with 15 autocorrelation ranging from negative to highly positive. We found lower population growth, 16 and twice as many extinctions, under lower autocorrelation. These responses closely matched 17 predictions based on a tolerance curve with environmental memory, showing that non-genetic 18 inheritance can be a major driver of population dynamics in randomly fluctuating 19 environments. 20 21

Noise barriers are widely adopted to control environmental noise, but their performance may be decreased by the too reflective surface of their material. The noise is reflected back towards the noise source and can reflect back again from parallel wall in case of highway applications. To improve the performance of barriers, an array Helmholtz resonators (HRs) is proposed to be formed in the barrier surface. The current investigation proves that by using Helmholtz resonator arrays in the surface of solid plastic material, it is possible to considerably improve the absorption of the material. In case the material has porous interlayer the formation of the resonator cavities is relatively simple. It is proved in the invstigation that by selecting the number and the depth of the resonator necks high absorption values can be reached over the large frequency range. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate that the use of HRs to improve absorption do not decrease the sound insulation properties of the investigated material.

In the today’s world of transport usage by passenger and the driver, Noise and vibration of the diesel engine vehicles are an important issue to be addressed by the automotive industries. This issue is not only makes the occupants fatigue but also increases the environmental noise and smoke pollution from the Diesel engine vehicle. As the usage of the diesel fuelled passenger cars are increasing due to its more mileage, better performance efficiency. Among these advantages the drawback with the diesel cars is the high vibration and noise due to its high compression ratio as we know. As a literature review it is observed that the number of cylinders also enhances the vibration and hence in this project the data related to the vibration and noise are measured by using the accelerometer and sensor and further the characteristics such as the amplitude, acceleration and frequency were compared for various loads and locations are done.

In the today’s world of transport usage by passenger and the driver, Noise and vibration of the diesel engine vehicles are an important issue to be addressed by the automotive industries. This issue is not only makes the occupants fatigue but also increases the environmental noise and smoke pollution from the Diesel engine vehicle. As the usage of the diesel fuelled passenger cars are increasing due to its more mileage, better performance efficiency. Among these advantages the drawback with the diesel cars is the high vibration and noise due to its high compression ratio as we know. As a literature review it is observed that the number of cylinders also enhances the vibration and hence in this project the data related to the vibration and noise are measured by using the accelerometer and sensor and further the characteristics such as the amplitude, acceleration and frequency were compared for various loads and locations are done.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is composed of a large number of tiny sensors. These energy-constrained sensors are deployed in a variety of environments to collect data such as temperature, humidity, and light intensity. Therefore, how to suppress the impact of environmental noise on the collection accuracy and extend the lifetime of WSNs is one of the prominent issues. This article proposes an optimized dictionary updating learning-based compressed data collection algorithm (ODUL-CDC) to suppress the impact of environmental noise on the accuracy of WSNs data collection and extend the life cycle of WSNs. The proposed algorithm uses the dictionary learning method to obtain a sparse dictionary by learning from the training data. The collection error caused by environmental noise is positively correlated with the degree of self-coherence of the sparse dictionary. Therefore, the self-coherence penalty term is introduced during the dictionary updating process, which can reduce the over-fitting of the training data in the dictionary learning process. Moreover, the self-coherence penalty term endows the learned sparse dictionary with a low-self-coherence structure. Experimental and simulation results show that, as compared with discrete cosine transform(DCT), K-SVD and IDL learning-based data collection methods, the proposed algorithm exhibits the highest increase in recovery accuracy of 3.2% in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range of 30-50 dB, the sampling ratio range of 25%-40% and the sparsity range from 3 to 30. Furthermore, the energy consumption is significantly less than that of the compared methods, which helps improve the network lifetime.

The rapid growth in computer vision applications that are affected by environmental conditions challenge the limitations of existing techniques. This is driving the development of new deep learning based vision techniques that are robust to environmental noise and interference. We propose a novel deep CNN model, which is trained from unmatched images for the purpose of image dehazing. This solution is enabled by the concept of the Siamese network architecture. Using object performance measures of image PSNR and SSIM we are able to demonstrate a quantitative and qualitative improvement in the network dehazing performance. This superior performance is achieved with significantly smaller training datasets than existing methods.

Coastal tourist towns are subject to considerable population fluctuations between the winter and the summer season, as well as between working days and holidays/weekends. Through the analysis of the data obtained by noise monitoring for both winter and summer seasons at two different points of the town, it was demonstrated that the environmental noise is directly related to the population behaviour. The analysis and comparison of the sound evolution along both working and weekend days showed very typical patterns, which can be used as keys for the forensic acoustics. By analysing these patterns, this method can be applied to determine whether a certain noise corresponds to a working day or to a holiday or weekend.

The University of Granada team received no external funding for this project. The UCL team was funded through the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (no. 740696) on "Soundscape Indices" (SSID)., Soundscape assessments by citizens are starting to emerge as a common practice, normally carried out in context by means of soundwalks along selected paths with volunteers. However, when such assessments are carried out, either in situ or in laboratory experiments, visually impaired citizens are not usually involved. To address this question, three soundwalks were carried out in 2020 in the city of Granada, in southern Spain, with the participation of visually impaired people. In this paper, we present the lessons learnt from this research with respect to the methodology issues that have to do with soundwalking and the surveying procedures when people with limited vison are participating, the assessment results, and a comparison with a soundscape evaluation carried out in 2019 without the collaboration of visually impaired people. The results of this preliminary campaign highlight that: (1) Adapting soundscape assessment protocols from standards for visually impaired people is a methodological challenge that requires research attention; (2) Some of the different patterns in the assessment of the soundscape pleasantness between visually impaired and nonvisually impaired participants emerged; (3) The perception of quietness may differ for visually impaired people when orientation and identification are factors that play a role in the acoustic environment evaluation., European Research Council (ERC) European Commission 740696

Microsleep, caused by sleep deprivation, sleep apnea, and narcolepsy, costs the U.S.'s economy more than $411 billion/year because of work performance reduction, injuries, and traffic accidents. Mitigating microsleep's consequences require an unobtrusive, reliable, and socially acceptable microsleep detection solution throughout the day, every day. Unfortunately, existing solutions do not meet these requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel behind-the-ear wearable device for microsleep detection, called WAKE. WAKE detects microsleep by monitoring biosignals from the brain, eye movements, facial muscle contractions, and sweat gland activities from behind the user's ears. In particular, we introduce a Three-fold Cascaded Amplifying (3CA) technique to tame the motion artifacts and environmental noises for capturing high fidelity signals. The behind-the-ear form factor is motivated by the fact that bone-conductance headphones, which are worn around the ear, are becoming widely used. This technology trend gives us an opportunity to enable a wide range of cognitive monitoring and improvement applications by integrating more sensing and actuating functionality into the ear-phone, making it a smarter one. Through our prototyping, we show that WAKE can suppress motion and environmental noise in real-time by 9.74-19.47 dB while walking, driving, or staying in different environments ensuring that the biosignals are captured reliably. We evaluated WAKE against gold-standard devices on 19 sleep-deprived and narcoleptic subjects. The Leave-One-Subject-Out Cross-Validation results show the feasibility of WAKE in microsleep detection on an unseen subject with average precision and recall of 76% and 85%, respectively.

Falling is one of the causes of accidental death of elderly people over 65 years old in Taiwan. If the fall incidents are not detected in a timely manner, it could lead to serious injury or even death of those who fell. General fall detection approaches require the users to wear sensors, which could be cumbersome for the users to put on, and misalignment of sensors could lead to erroneous readings. In this paper, we propose using computer vision and applied machine-learning algorithms to detect fall without any sensors. We applied OpenPose real-time multi-person 2D pose estimation to detect movement of a subject using two datasets of 570 &times, 30 frames recorded in five different rooms from eight different viewing angles. The system retrieves the locations of 25 joint points of the human body and detects human movement through detecting the joint point location changes. The system is able to effectively identify the joints of the human body as well as filtering ambient environmental noise for an improved accuracy. The use of joint points instead of images improves the training time effectively as well as eliminating the effects of traditional image-based approaches such as blurriness, light, and shadows. This paper uses single-view images to reduce equipment costs. We experimented with time series recurrent neural network, long- and short-term memory, and gated recurrent unit models to learn the changes in human joint points in continuous time. The experimental results show that the fall detection accuracy of the proposed model is 98.2%, which outperforms the baseline 88.9% with 9.3% improvement.

One-shot person Re-identification, which owns one labeled sample among numerous unlabeled data for each identity, is proposed to tackle the problem of the shortage of labeled data. Considering the scenarios without sufficient labeled data, it is very challenging to keep abreast of the performance of the supervised task in which sufficient labeled samples are available. In this paper, we propose a relation-based attention network with hybrid memory, which can make full use of the global information to pay attention to the identity features for model training with the relation-based attention network. Importantly, our specially designed network architecture effectively reduces the interference of environmental noise. Moreover, we propose a hybrid memory to train the one-shot data and unlabeled data in a unified framework, which notably contributes to the performance of person Re-identification. In particular, our designed one-shot feature update mode effectively alleviates the problem of overfitting, which is caused by the lack of supervised information during the training process. Compared with state-of-the-art unsupervised and one-shot algorithms for person Re-identification, our method achieves considerable improvements of 6.7%, 4.6%, and 11.5% on Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and MSMT17 datasets, respectively, and becomes the new state-of-the-art method for one-shot person Re-identification.

Rail transport is the second most important way of transporting people and freights by land in the European Union. Rail noise affects around 12 million people in the European Union during the day and around 9 million at night. There are two possible ways to assess environmental noise: noise measurement in situ and prediction using mathematical models. The aim of the work is based on the performed measurements and selected noise predictions to evaluate the accuracy of the prediction models and assess their sensitivity to various aspects. Two measuring points in the Banská Bystrica Self-Governing Region, within Slovakia, were selected for measurement, which is characterized by increased mobility of the population. For prediction, the two methodologies were selected (Schall 03 and Methodical instructions for the calculation of sound pressure level from transport). The results show that the Schall 03 method is sensitive to the measurement location (the value reaches half of the significance level) and to the location–period interaction. The second prediction method is sensitive to systematic error (absolute term) and, such as Schall 03, to the location–period interaction. This method systematically overestimates the results. Results showed greater accuracy of both prediction models compared to the measured noise values than the results of the authors in other countries and conditions.

Noise is a major source of pollution with a strong impact on health. Noise assessment is therefore a very important issue to reduce its impact on humans. To overcome the limitations of the classical method of noise assessment (such as simulation tools or noise observatories), alternative approaches have been developed, among which is collaborative noise measurement via a smartphone. Following this approach, the NoiseCapture application was proposed, in an open science framework, providing free access to a considerable amount of information and offering interesting perspectives of spatial and temporal noise analysis for the scientific community. After more than 3 years of operation, the amount of collected data is considerable. Its exploitation for a sound environment analysis, however, requires one to consider the intrinsic limits of each collected information, defined, for example, by the very nature of the data, the measurement protocol, the technical performance of the smartphone, the absence of calibration, the presence of anomalies in the collected data, etc. The purpose of this article is thus to provide enough information, in terms of quality, consistency, and completeness of the data, so that everyone can exploit the database, in full control.

Recently in Japan, noises from wind turbines and domestic use heat sources sometimes cause an increase in noise annoyance owing to low-frequency tonal components. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the tonal components on the annoyance of the environmental noise. The authors conducted an auditory test in the laboratory to evaluate the annoyance of tonal noise using a seven-step rating method. The stimuli were composed of a broadband noise modeling of the environmental noise (25, 30, and 35 dB) and a low-frequency tonal component. With the tonal component added to the broadband noise, the frequency and tonal audibility were varied to 40, 50, 100, 200, and 400 Hz and 0, 3, 6, 9, and 12 dB, respectively. The amount of increase in annoyance owing to the addition of the tonal component was quantitatively evaluated as a tonal adjustment by comparing it with broadband noise. As a result, tonal adjustment ranged from 0 to 7 dB, and the higher the tonal frequency, the larger the value. For the test background noise level, the lower the background noise level of the test sound, the greater the value. This trend suggests that the influence of tonal components on subjective impressions is stronger in quiet environments such as residential areas. This result may provide a basis for the evaluation method, which varies the penalty in the noise evaluation according to the frequency of the pure tones and the noise level.

This paper presents six environmental noise indicators and two fuzzy acoustic indexes for urban spaces integrated with a permanent monitoring system. Likewise, they can help the management practices of land traffic and other noise generation sources in cities. The environmental noise indicators are defined by combining the equivalent continuous sound levels with A-weighting for time intervals of five, thirty, and sixty minutes and the non-harmful values set by national and international standards. Exposure and severity are the fuzzy indexes obtained with a model that weights the six environmental noise indicators utilising membership functions, rules and the centroid defuzzification method. The two fuzzy indexes are evaluation metrics of the social-urban acoustic impact that monitoring and evaluation programs can apply for standard time intervals or other time selection. Assessment traditional methods use the equivalent continuous sound level by integrating the sound pressure for a short or long time. When the analysis is for standard intervals, for example, from 7 to 19, 19 to 23 and 23 to 7 local time in hours, a sound pressure very high in short time subintervals greatly influences the equivalent continuous sound level of the long time interval. This situation is unfavourable for a quick assessment, and its interpretation may have significant uncertainty. The time intervals of five, thirty, and sixty minutes are very useful in environmental noise permanent monitoring systems. However, their traditional evaluations are complex to obtain the acoustic impact, the exposure time and noise severity that people receive during a prolonged stay or transit through an area. All tests used measurements from an environmental noise monitoring system over several months.

The number of operations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), commonly referred to as “drones”, has strongly increased in the past and is likely to further grow in the future. Therefore, drones are becoming a growing new source of environmental noise pollution, and annoyance reactions to drone noise are likely to occur in an increasing share of the population. To date, research on drone noise emission characteristics, and in particular also on health impacts, seems scarce, but systematic overviews on these topics are missing. The objective of this study was to establish a systematic literature review on drone noise emissions and noise effects on humans. The paper presents the methodology of the systematic reviews performed separately for noise emission and noise effects, assembles current literature, gives an overview on the state of knowledge, and identifies research gaps. Current literature suggests that drone noise is substantially more annoying than road traffic or aircraft noise due to special acoustic characteristics such as pure tones and high-frequency broadband noise. A range of open questions remains to be tackled by future studies.

Depth segmentation has attracted much attention in fields ranging from industrial monitoring to image understanding. However, it remains difficult to segment objects positioned at different depths with high speed and high accuracy. This paper proposes a novel depth segmentation scheme based on the phase-shift invariance of the segmentation lines and a simple optimization framework that exploits simple image processing algorithms to enhance its performance in noisy environments. Without the need for precalibration or complementary cues, this approach performs depth segmentation effectively by changing the pattern sequence selectively during the step of postprocessing. First, the structural configuration and special properties of the phase-shifting algorithm are described, following which an optimization framework is established to allow data matting and labeling. Simulation and experimental results show that this approach can perform depth segmentation efficiently despite the influence of environmental noise. Moreover, the processing is of low cost, only needing to detect the intersections of discontinuities among three different wrapped phase maps. Most significantly, this method is robust to variations in environmental noise, camera exposure, and object color and texture.

The coexistence of species sustains the ecological balance in nature. This paper focuses on sufficient conditions for the coexistence of a three-species stochastic competitive model, where the model has non-linear diffusion parts. Three values λ3z, λ3x and λ3y are introduced and calculated from the coefficients, which can be considered as threshold values. Moreover, convergence in distribution of the positive solution of the model is also addressed. A few numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate the theoretical results.

The signal propagation and logical operations performed by the electrostatic interaction between the nanodots belonging to the quantum cellular automata (QCA) cells of different polarizations are influenced by the environmental noise like temperature fluctuations. The effect of thermal randomness on the computational fidelity of QCA-based 4-bit binary-to-Gray and binary-to-excess-3 code converters is studied in this article. The fidelity of computation of these digital circuits in the presence of noise is calculated by applying Shannon’s information-theoretic measures, and thus, the robustness of the quantum cellular automata circuits to thermal noise is estimated. Finally, the temperature range over which the semiconductor quantum cellular automata circuits yield reliable computation is indicated. The proposed converters have minimum number of clock zones and high device density.

Environmental noises often affect population dynamics, and hence many benefits are gained in using stochastic models since real life is full of stochasticity and randomness. In this paper a stochastic extension of a model by Asfaw et al. (Int J Biomath 11:1850057, 2018) is considered. Due to the non-linearity of the model, first, a simplified stochastic plant-herbivore model is formulated and analyzed for its global Lipschitz continuity, positivity, existence and uniqueness of solutions. Second, the analysis is extended to a more complex and realistic model. Numerical simulations using Euler-Maruyama method are employed to demonstrate the long term dynamics. It was found that the noise added to the herbivore population resulted more change in the dynamics than the noise added to the plant population (food source). Ignoring the environmental noise could make the land management and wild life conservation not to maintain their goals.

Electromagnetic tracking has widely been used in many fields, such as virtual reality, motion tracking, and biomedicine. Especially in surgical navigation systems, electromagnetic tracking offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional X-ray fluoroscopy. In this paper, we present a new magnetic tracking method based on phase difference detection. Two 3-axis magnetic sources and one 3-axis sensor are needed in the tracking system. The position and orientation of the sensor can be obtained simply by measuring the phase difference between the square of the synthetic magnetic induction intensity at the position of the sensor and the square of the excitation current of the magnetic source. The experimental results indicate that this method has a good tracking accuracy and speed. The mean position error is less than 0.1 cm, and the theoretical tracking time can be less than 3.5 ms when the frequency of the excitation current is no less than 1 kHz. Furthermore, antinoise simulations show that the tracking performance of this method is more robust against environmental noise than that of existing methods. Therefore, the electromagnetic tracking method proposed in this paper has good application prospects in many respects. It enables real-time tracking with high accuracy and a strong antinoise ability.