A postprocessor for an interval-based M-ary detection system that monitors long-duration input

We consider detection problems that involve continuous monitoring of long-duration input signals. Our monitoring system uses an M-ary event detector that operates on short, overlapping intervals of the input. We introduce a postprocessor to interpret the sequence of interval-based detector labels output by the M-ary event detector to get straightforward event declarations. We propose a performance evaluation scheme that provides insightful measures of the system´s ability to detect events. As an illustrative example, the proposed postprocessor and evaluation scheme are applied to the outputs of an interval-based M-ary event detector responsible for isolating and labeling occurrences of 15 classes of acoustic transients from a signal recorded via a passive sonar system.