Traffic Noise Estimation from Satellite Imagery with Deep Learning

Road traffic noise represents a global health issue. Despite its importance, noise data are unavailable in many regions of the world. We therefore propose to approximate noise data from satellite imagery in an end-to-end Deep Learning approach. We train a U-Net segmentation model to estimate road noise based on freely available Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and existing road traffic noise estimates for Switzerland. We are able to achieve an RMSE of 8.8 dB(A) for day-time traffic noise and 7.6 dB(A) for nighttime traffic noise with a spatial resolution of 10 m. In addition to identifying major road networks, our model succeeds to predict the spatial propagation of noise. Our results suggest that this approach provides a pathway to estimating road traffic noise for areas for which no such measures are available