On the use of spectro-temporal features for the IEEE AASP challenge ‘detection and classification of acoustic scenes and events’

In this contribution, an acoustic event detection system based on spectro-temporal features and a two-layer hidden Markov model as back-end is proposed within the framework of the IEEE AASP challenge `Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events´ (D-CASE). Noise reduction based on the log-spectral amplitude estimator by [1] and noise power density estimation by [2] is used for signal enhancement. Performance based on three different kinds of features is compared, i.e. for amplitude modulation spectrogram, Gabor filterbank-features and conventional Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), all of them known from automatic speech recognition (ASR). The evaluation is based on the office live recordings provided within the D-CASE challenge. The influence of the signal enhancement is investigated and the increase in recognition rate by the proposed features in comparison to MFCC-features is shown. It is demonstrated that the proposed spectro-temporal features achieve a better recognition accuracy than MFCCs.