An EU Environmental Noise Directive has defined the “quiet zone” and required EU member states to implement action plans in order to protect the tranquility of “quiet zones”, including monitoring, promulgating, consulting, and formulating criteria. The analysis of current practices in Europe shows that the European Environmental Agency (EEA) considers the concept of quietness as multifaceted. While the quiet zone can be delineated based on both subjective and objective standards, its channels, approaches, and indications vary greatly. As a result, various cities have delineated their quiet zones based on their specific local conditions. With regard to the feasibility of promoting “quirt zones” in our country, given that the existing practice of various noise controls areas and traffic calming zones in our country overlaps the quiet zone adopted in Europe in concept, we suggest that the “residential community” and “school surroundings” in the first and second noise control areas be considered pilot “quiet zones” to be promoted in our country, which should be given the priority to monitor and control the environmental noise level in these areas where residents and students live and gather almost all the time. Currently, in the vicinity of residential communities in our country, the noise issue caused by moving motor vehicles has become a major factor that affects the environmental tranquility. This project integrates a series of components, such as array microphones, Class 1 noise meter, anemometers, plate recognition system, and control cabinet, to create an acoustic sensor module. The microphone or microphone array has signal modulation and noise measurement abilities. Once a moving motor vehicle is detected to emit a noise level higher than the trigger level, the system’s image capturing or video recording functions will be activated immediately. It is expected that, with the maturity of illegal activity monitoring and graphical evidence production, noise control for moving motor vehicles will be enhanced and the efficacy of science and technology enforcement perfected. In addition, the abovementioned control cabinet can be directly combined with an air quality sensor to form an “air and noise sensing module”, which might be deployed at the locations of the existing air quality sensors in the future. As long as the air quality sensor can be put into a control cabinet, the control cabinet can be deployed at the location of the existing air quality sensor. Hence, a project for applying a data collection system of the environmental noise sensing IoT to the environmental noise monitoring IoT of a smart city can be deployed making use of the existing air quality sensor network.

quiet zone，acoustic camera，science and technology enforcement，array microphones，acoustic sensor module，air and noise sensing module