This paper presents a novel two-phase method for audio representation, Discriminative and Compact Audio Representation (DCAR), and evaluates its performance at detecting events in consumer-produced videos. In the first phase of DCAR, each audio track is modeled using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) that includes several components to capture the variability within that track. The second phase takes into account both global structure and local structure. In this phase, the components are rendered more discriminative and compact by formulating an optimization problem on Grassmannian manifolds, which we found represents the structure of audio effectively. Our experiments used the YLI-MED dataset (an open TRECVID-style video corpus based on YFCC100M), which includes ten events. The results show that the proposed DCAR representation consistently outperforms state-of-the-art audio representations. DCAR's advantage over i-vector, mv-vector, and GMM representations is significant for both easier and harder discrimination tasks. We discuss how these performance differences across easy and hard cases follow from how each type of model leverages (or doesn't leverage) the intrinsic structure of the data. Furthermore, DCAR shows a particularly notable accuracy advantage on events where humans have more difficulty classifying the videos, i.e., events with lower mean annotator confidence.
Given the exponential growth of videos published on the Internet, mechanisms for clustering, searching, and browsing large numbers of videos have become a major research area. More importantly, there is a demand for event detectors that go beyond the simple finding of objects but rather detect more abstract concepts, such as "feeding an animal" or a "wedding ceremony". This article presents an approach for event classification that enables searching for arbitrary events, including more abstract concepts, in found video collections based on the analysis of the audio track. The approach does not rely on speech processing, and is language-indepent, instead it generates models for a set of example query videos using a mixture of two types of audio features: Linear-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients and Modulation Spectrogram Features. This approach can be used in complement with video analysis and requires no domain specific tagging. Application of the approach to the TRECVid MED 2011 development set, which consists of more than 4000 random "wild" videos from the Internet, has shown a detection accuracy of 64 including those videos which do not contain an audio track. Audio-based video event detection (VED) on user-generated content (UGC) aims to find videos that show an observable event such as a wedding ceremony or birthday party rather than a sound, such as music, clapping or singing. The difficulty of video content analysis on UGC lies in the acoustic variability and lack of structure of the data. The UGC task has been explored mainly by computer vision, but can be benefited by the used of audio. The i-vector system is state-of-the-art in Speaker Verification, and is outperforming a conventional Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based approach. The system compensates for undesired acoustic variability and extracts information from the acoustic environment, making it a meaningful choice for detection on UGC. This paper employs the i-vector-based system for audio-based VED on UGC and expands the understanding of the system on the task. It also includes a performance comparison with the conventional GMM-based and state-of-the-art Random Forest (RF)-based systems. The i-vector system aids audio-based event detection by addressing UGC audio characteristics. It outperforms the GMM-based system, and is competitive with the RF-based system in terms of the Missed Detection (MD) rate at 4 and 2.8 False Alarm (FA) rates, and complements the RF-based system by demonstrating slightly improvement in combination over the standalone systems. We propose a new blind segmentation approach to acoustic event detection (AED) based on i-vectors. Conventional approaches to AED often required well-segmented data with non-overlapping boundaries for competing events. Inspired by block-based automatic image annotation in image retrieval tasks, we blindly segment audio streams into equal-length pieces, label the underlying observed acoustic events with multiple categories and with no event boundary information, extract i-vector for them, and perform classification using support vector machine and maximal figure-of-merit based classifiers. Experiments on various sets of audio data show promising results with an average of 8 absolute gain in F1 over the conventional hidden Markov model based approach. An enhanced robustness at different noise levels is also observed. The key to the success lies in the enhanced discrimination power offered by the i-vector representation of the acoustic data. Index Terms: acoustic event detection, i-vector, blind segmentation, support vector machine, maximal figure-of-merit 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. 