Sniffing Out the City — SenSys 2025 Best Poster Award

Julia Gersey, Jatin Aggarwal, Jiale Zhang, Jesse Codling, and Pei Zhang. 2025. Poster Abstract: Sniffing Out the City - Vehicular Multimodal Sensing for Environmental and Infrastructure Analysis. Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 632–633. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715014.3724043

Abstract: Assessing urban infrastructure and environment quality at scale remains a challenge. This work presents a multimodal sensing framework that integrates computer vision-based infrastructure analysis with mobile air quality monitoring to explore urban conditions beyond the camera's field of view. A vehicle-mounted system captures video data for semantic segmentation of roads and buildings while an air intake unit collects temperature, humidity, CO2, TVOC, and AQI levels. A preliminary test drive in Ann Arbor demonstrated expected correlations between CO2 and TVOC spikes in dense urban areas, providing a proof of concept for linking environmental sensing with visual urban analysis. Future work will refine sensor calibration, adaptive sampling strategies, and predictive modeling to improve accuracy and scalability.