Map Seeking Circuits: a Novel Method of Detecting Auditory Events using Iterative Template Mapping

This paper reports on a new algorithm to detect the presence of a known acoustic signal in an unknown source. The algorithm, map seeking circuits, has been successfully used in the visual domain. The algorithm seeks to find an appropriate transform that will match a stored template to an unknown signal. The algorithm uses superposition to significantly reduce the computational complexity of searching for a given feature in a signal. This results in a linear computational increase rather than an exponential increase as the complexity of the signal increases. The algorithm was tested with a corpus of six instruments. Results varied from 66% for the piano to 94% for the horn