This work is focused on the automatic recognition of environmental noise sources that affect humans’ health and quality of life, namely industrial, aircraft, railway and road traffic. However, the recognition of the latter, which have the largest influence on citizens’ daily lives, is still an open issue. Therefore, although considering all the aforementioned noise sources, this paper especially focuses on improving the recognition of road noise events by taking advantage of the perceived noise differences along the road vehicle pass-by (which may be divided into different phases: approaching, passing and receding). To that effect, a hierarchical classification scheme that considers these phases independently has been implemented. The proposed classification scheme yields an averaged classification accuracy of 92.5%, which is, in absolute terms, 3% higher than the baseline (a traditional flat classification scheme without hierarchical structure). In particular, it outperforms the baseline in the classification of light and heavy vehicles, yielding a classification accuracy 7% and 4% higher, respectively. Finally, listening tests are performed to compare the system performance with human recognition ability. The results reveal that, although an expert human listener can achieve higher recognition accuracy than the proposed system, the latter outperforms the non-trained listener in 10% in average.

The historical datasets at operating mine sites are usually large. Directly applying large datasets to build prediction models may lead to inaccurate results. To overcome the real-world challenges, this study aimed to handle these large datasets using Gaussian mixture modelling (GMM) for developing a novel and accurate prediction model of truck productivity. A large dataset of truck haulage collected at operating mine sites was clustered by GMM into three latent classes before the prediction model was built. The labels of these latent classes generated a latent variable. Two multiple linear regression (MLR) models were then constructed, including the ordinary-MLR (O-MLR) and the hybrid GMM-MLR models. The GMM-MLR model incorporated the observed input variables and a latent variable in the form of interaction terms. The O-MLR model was the baseline model and did not involve the latent variable. The GMM-MLR model performed considerably better than the O-MLR model in predicting truck productivity. The interaction terms quantitatively measured the differences in how the observed input variables affected truck productivity in three classes (high, medium, and low truck productivity). The haul distance was the most crucial input variable in the GMM-MLR model. This study provides new insights into handling massive amounts of data in truck haulage datasets and a more accurate prediction model for truck productivity.

Last decades, rolling bearing faults assessment and their evolution with time have been receiving much interest due to their crucial role as part of the Conditional Based Maintenance (CBM) of rotating machinery. This paper investigates bearing faults diagnosis based on classification approach using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features. Throughout, only one criterion is defined for the evaluation of the performance during all the cycle of the classification process. This is the Average Classification Rate (ACR) obtained from the confusion matrix. In every test performed, the generated features vectors are considered along to discriminate between four fault conditions as normal bearings, bearings with inner and outer race faults and ball faults. Many configurations were tested in order to determinate the optimal values of input parameters, as the frame analysis length, the order of model, and others. The experimental application of the proposed method was based on vibration signals taken from the bearing datacenter website of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). Results show that proposed method can reliably classify different fault conditions and have a highest classification performance under some conditions.