A neural network approach for sound event detection in real life audio

This paper presents and compares two algorithms based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) for sound event detection in real life audio. Both systems have been developed and evaluated with the material provided for the third task of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2016 challenge. For the first algorithm, we make use of an ANN trained on different features extracted from the down-mixed mono channel audio. Secondly, we analyse a binaural algorithm where the same feature extraction is performed on four different channels: the two binaural channels, the averaged monaural signal and the difference between the binaural channels. The proposed feature set comprehends, along with mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and log-mel energies, also activity information extracted with two different voice activity detection (VAD) algorithms. Moreover, we will present results obtained with two different neural architectures, namely multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) and recurrent neural networks. The highest scores obtained on the DCASE 2016 evaluation dataset are achieved by a MLP trained on binaural features and adaptive energy VAD; they consist of an averaged error rate of 0.79 and an averaged F1 score of 48.1%, thus marking an improvement over the best score registered in the DCASE 2016 challenge.