Non-speech audio event detection

Audio event detection is one of the tasks of the European project VIDIVIDEO. This paper focuses on the detection of non-speech events, and as such only searches for events in audio segments that have been previously classified as non-speech. Preliminary experiments with a small corpus of sound effects have shown the potential of this type of corpus for training purposes. This paper describes our experiments with SVM and HMM-based classifiers, using a 290-hour corpus of sound effects. Although we have only built detectors for 15 semantic concepts so far, the method seems easily portable to other concepts. The paper reports experiments with multiple features, different kernels and several analysis windows. Preliminary experiments on documentaries and films yielded promising results, despite the difficulties posed by the mixtures of audio events that characterize real sounds.