Abstract Sound analysis research has mainly been focused on speech and music processing. The deployed methodologies are not suitable for analysis of sounds with varying background noise, in many cases with very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we present a method for the detection of patterns of interest in audio signals. We propose novel trainable feature extractors, which we call COPE (Combination of Peaks of Energy). The structure of a COPE feature extractor is determined using a single prototype sound pattern in an automatic configuration process, which is a type of representation learning. We construct a set of COPE feature extractors, configured on a number of training patterns. Then we take their responses to build feature vectors that we use in combination with a classifier to detect and classify patterns of interest in audio signals. We carried out experiments on four public data sets: MIVIA audio events, MIVIA road events, ESC-10 and TU Dortmund data sets. The results that we achieved (recognition rate equal to 91.71 on the MIVIA audio events, 94 on the MIVIA road events, 81.25 on the ESC-10 and 94.27 on the TU Dortmund) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and are higher than the ones obtained by other existing approaches. The COPE feature extractors have high robustness to variations of SNR. Real-time performance is achieved even when the value of a large number of features is computed.
Evaluation of algorithms for audio event detection on public benchmark data sets is a valuable tool for objective comparison of performance. The great attention that was dedicated to music and speech analysis determined the publication of several data sets used in scientific challenges for benchmarking of algorithms. The MIREX challenge series evaluated systems for music information retrieval (MIR) @cite_30 . The CHiME challenge focused on speech analysis in noisy environments @cite_16 . The Acoustic event detection and classification'' task of the CLEAR challenges (2006 and 2007) focused on the detection of sound events related to seminars, such as speech, chair moving, door opening and applause @cite_79 . Recently, the DCASE challenge @cite_25 stimulated the interest of researchers on audio processing for the analysis of environmental sounds. The attention was driven towards audio event detection and classification and scene classification.
@cite_30 @cite_79 @cite_16 @cite_25
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This paper is a summary of the first CLEAR evaluation on CLassification of Events, Activities and Relationships - which took place in early 2006 and concluded with a two day evaluation workshop in April 2006. CLEAR is an international effort to evaluate systems for the multimodal perception of people, their activities and interactions. It provides a new international evaluation framework for such technologies. It aims to support the definition of common evaluation tasks and metrics, to coordinate and leverage the production of necessary multimodal corpora and to provide a possibility for comparing different algorithms and approaches on common benchmarks, which will result in faster progress in the research community. This paper describes the evaluation tasks, including metrics and databases used, that were conducted in CLEAR 2006, and provides an overview of the results. The evaluation tasks in CLEAR 2006 included person tracking, face detection and tracking, person identification, head pose estimation, vehicle tracking as well as acoustic scene analysis. Overall, more than 20 subtasks were conducted, which included acoustic, visual and audio-visual analysis for many of the main tasks, as well as different data domains and evaluation conditions. Distant microphone speech recognition systems that operate with human-like robustness remain a distant goal. The key difficulty is that operating in everyday listening conditions entails processing a speech signal that is reverberantly mixed into a noise background composed of multiple competing sound sources. This paper describes a recent speech recognition evaluation that was designed to bring together researchers from multiple communities in order to foster novel approaches to this problem. The task was to identify keywords from sentences reverberantly mixed into audio backgrounds binaurally recorded in a busy domestic environment. The challenge was designed to model the essential difficulties of the multisource environment problem while remaining on a scale that would make it accessible to a wide audience. Compared to previous ASR evaluations a particular novelty of the task is that the utterances to be recognised were provided in a continuous audio background rather than as pre-segmented utterances thus allowing a range of background modelling techniques to be employed. The challenge attracted thirteen submissions. This paper describes the challenge problem, provides an overview of the systems that were entered and provides a comparison alongside both a baseline recognition system and human performance. The paper discusses insights gained from the challenge and lessons learnt for the design of future such evaluations. For intelligent systems to make best use of the audio modality, it is important that they can recognize not just speech and music, which have been researched as specific tasks, but also general sounds in everyday environments. To stimulate research in this field we conducted a public research challenge: the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE). In this paper, we report on the state of the art in automatically classifying audio scenes, and automatically detecting and classifying audio events. We survey prior work as well as the state of the art represented by the submissions to the challenge from various research groups. We also provide detail on the organization of the challenge, so that our experience as challenge hosts may be useful to those organizing challenges in similar domains. We created new audio datasets and baseline systems for the challenge; these, as well as some submitted systems, are publicly available under open licenses, to serve as benchmarks for further research in general-purpose machine listening.