The world is urbanizing rapidly with more than half of the global population now living in cities. Improving urban environments for the well-being of the increasing number of urban citizens is becoming one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. Even though it is common that city planners have visions of a ’good urban milieu’, those visions are concerning visual aesthetics or practical matters. The qualitative perspective of sound, such as sonic diversity and acoustic ecology are neglected aspects in architectural design. Urban planners and politicians are therefore largely unaware of the importance of sounds for the intrinsic quality of a place. Whenever environmental acoustics is on the agenda, the topic is noise abatement or noise legislation – a quantitative attenuation of sounds. Some architects may involve acoustical aspects in their work but sound design or acoustic design has yet to develop to a distinct discipline and be incorporated in urban planning.My aim was to investigate to what extent the urban soundscape is likely to improve if modern architectural techniques merge with principles of acoustics. This is an important, yet unexplored, research area. My study explores and analyses the acoustical aspects in urban development and includes interviews with practitioners in the field of urban acoustics, situated in New York City. My conclusion is that to achieve a better understanding of the human living conditions in mega-cities, there is a need to include sonic components into the holistic sense of urban development.

Target tracking is a broad subject area extensively studied in many engineering disciplines. In this thesis, target tracking implies the temporal estimation of target features such as the target's direction-of-arrival (DOA), the target's boundary pixels in a sequence of images, and/or the target's position in space. For multiple target tracking, we have introduced a new motion model that incorporates an acceleration component along the heading direction of the target. We have also shown that the target motion parameters can be considered part of a more general feature set for target tracking, e.g., target frequencies, which may be unrelated to the target motion, can be used to improve the tracking performance. We have introduced an acoustic multiple-target tracker using a flexible observation model based on an image tracking approach by assuming that the DOA observations might be spurious and that some of the DOAs might be missing in the observation set. We have also addressed the acoustic calibration problem from sources of opportunity such as beacons or a moving source. We have derived and compared several calibration methods for the case where the node can hear a moving source whose position can be reported back to the node. The particle filter, as a recursive algorithm, requires an initialization phase prior to tracking a state vector. The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm has been used for sampling from intractable multivariate target distributions and is well suited for the initialization problem. Since the particle filter only needs samples around the mode, we have modified the MH algorithm to generate samples distributed around the modes of the target posterior. By simulations, we show that this mode hungry algorithm converges an order of magnitude faster than the original MH scheme. Finally, we have developed a general framework for the joint state-space tracking problem. A proposal strategy for joint state-space tracking using the particle filters is defined by carefully placing the random support of the joint filter in the region where the final posterior is likely to lie. Computer simulations demonstrate improved performance and robustness of the joint state-space when using the new particle proposal strategy.

No description available.

Underwater sensor networks find applications in oceanographic data collection, pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster prevention, assisted navigation, tactical surveillance, and mine reconnaissance. The enabling technology for these applications is acoustic wireless networking. UnderWater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UW-ASNs) consist of sensors and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) deployed to perform collaborative monitoring tasks. The objective of this research is to explore fundamental key aspects of underwater acoustic communications, propose communication architectures for UW-ASNs, and develop efficient sensor communication protocols tailored for the underwater environment. Specifically, different deployment strategies for UW-ASNs are studied, and statistical deployment analysis for different architectures is provided. Moreover, a model characterizing the underwater acoustic channel utilization efficiency is introduced. The model allows setting the optimal packet size for underwater communications. Two distributed routing algorithms are proposed for delay-insensitive and delay-sensitive applications. The proposed routing solutions allow each node to select its next hop, with the objective of minimizing the energy consumption taking the different application requirements into account. In addition, a resilient routing solution to guarantee survivability of the network to node and link failures in long-term monitoring missions is developed. Moreover, a distributed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for UW-ASNs is proposed. It is a transmitter-based code division multiple access scheme that incorporates a novel closed-loop distributed algorithm to set the optimal transmit power and code length. It aims at achieving high network throughput, low channel access delay, and low energy consumption. Finally, an efficient cross-layer communication solution tailored for multimedia traffic (i.e., video and audio streams, still images, and scalar sensor data) is introduced.

In general the acoustic wave is used as a detecting tool in the ocean, its application placing a sound source into ocean, then the sound may impinge involves the target by wave propagation in the ocean. Due to the reflection and scattering effect of target, part of acoustic energy will be received by transducer through the path of reflection. The goal of target identification can be achieved by signal processing finally. If a submarine wish to avoid the detection by sonar system , it should attenuate the acoustic energy . Therefore the reflected signal can not be analyzed and distinguished by sonar system .The area of underwater acoustic attenuation has been researched for camouflaging submarine purpose for many years. There are two acoustic energy attenuation methods to reduce the reflective wave and transmitted wave. One is active attenuation control, which is to understand how the destructive interference of incident acoustic wave could be achieved for acoustic energy attenuation purposes. The other one is passive acoustic attenuation technique, which rely on the attenuation performance of underwater acoustic material to reduce the acoustic energy of incident wave. To be evaluated the acoustic absorption efficiency of material. Although the efficiency of active attenuation control is better compared with passive acoustic attenuation technique, the development of active attenuation control have not been highly pursued in the commercial market for underwater application, due to the limitations in piezo-composite technology. The cost of installation and maintenance is also higher in active control. This thesis studied the acoustic absorptive material based on passive acoustic attenuation technique . It could be attenuated the acoustic energy and spectrum of reflection and transmitted wave. Therefore, the signal can not be analyzed and distinguishing by sonar system. According to Alberich acoustic absorption coating, their designs have the inherent problem of degradation under hydrostatic pressure and temperature. Thus, the objective of this thesis is to study the characteristics of the acoustic absorptive material at various water depth where the hydrostatic pressure are different. To measure the characteristics of acoustic material, an experimental system is setup, and the standard measuring method and criterion is also studied for future experimental reference. Furthermore, the different measurement parameters are discussed for accuracy of experimental results. There are five specimens tested in this experiment. The specimens are mainly made of neoprene and sawdust mixture and marked as A1¡BA2¡BA3¡BA4¡Band A5 respectively. The composites of these specimens are analyzed by x-ray diffraction meter. The physical properties and the acoustic absorption in airborne were measured before underwater hydrostatic pressure applied on these specimens. The physical properties show that the impedance of these specimens is very close to acoustic impedance of the water. Therefore, the specimen may be considered an acoustic isolator in the air. To reduce the boundaries interference, such as reflection, diffraction and scattering signal. The pulse sound is used as sound source in this underwater experiment. Moreover, the gating system is applied to capture the proper signals for analysis. The echo reduction and insertion loss are measured in the 11 to 30 kHz frequency region for acoustic absorption evaluation in this experiment. The performance of experiment is found that specimen has the echo reduction about 10 dB and the insertion loss about 15 dB at 1 bar hydrostatic pressure. But when the hydrostatic pressure was increased to 5 bar, the echo reduction and insertion loss were both decreased by 3 dB. In addition, when the hydrostatic pressure was loaded at 10 bar, the echo reduction was decreased by 8 dB, and the insertion loss was decreased by 5 dB. It became evident that the efficiency of acoustic absorption is degraded under the higher hydrostatic pressure.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Leaves 86-90 lacking. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-93).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-119). Also issued on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

The propagation of acoustic waves through water-saturated granular sediments has been widely studied, yet existing propagation models can not adequately predict the speed and attenuation of sound across the range of frequencies of interest in underwater acoustics, especially in loosely packed sediments that have been recently disturbed by storms or wave action. Advances in modeling are currently dependent on experimental validation of various components of existing models. To begin to address these deficiencies, three well-controlled laboratory experiments were performed in gravity-settled glass beads and reconstituted sand sediments. Sound speed and attenuation measurements in the 0.5 kHz to 10 kHz range are scarce in the literature, so a resonator method was used to investigate a reconstituted sand sediment in this range. The literature contains laboratory and in situ measurements of sound speed and attenuation at higher frequencies, but existing models can not predict both the speed of sound and attenuation simultaneously in some sediments. A time-of-flight technique was used to determine the speed of sound and attenuation in monodisperse water-saturated glass beads, binary glass bead mixtures, and reconstituted sediment samples in the frequency range 200 kHz to 900 kHz to investigate the effect of sediment inhomogeneity. The effect of porosity, independent of changes in other sediment physical properties, has not been demonstrated in the experimental literature. Therefore, a fluidized bed technique was used to independently vary the porosity of monodisperse glass bead samples from 0.37 to 0.43 and a Fourier phase technique was used to determine the speed and attenuation of sound. Collecting these results together, measured sound speeds showed positive dispersion below 50 kHz while negative dispersion was observed above 200 kHz for some samples. Attenuation measurements showed an approximately f⁰̇⁵ dependence in the low frequency regime and an approximately f³̇⁵ dependence for large-grained samples in the high frequency regime. The laboratory experiments presented in this work demonstrate that both sound speed and attenuation in idealized loosely packed water-saturated sediments can not be simultaneously predicted by existing models within the uncertainties of the model input parameters, but the independent effect of porosity on sound speed can be predicted. / text