Context awareness using environmental noise classification

Context-awareness is essential to the development of adaptive information systems. Environmental noise can provide a rich source of information about the current context. We describe our approach for automatically sensing and recognising noise from typical environments of daily life, such as office, car and city street. In this paper we present our hidden Markov model based noise classifier. We describe the architecture of the system, compare classification results from the system with human listening tests, and discuss open issues in environmental noise classification for mobile computing. 1