A morphological model for simulating acoustic scenes and its application to sound event detection

Abstract

This paper introduces a model for simulating environmental acoustic scenes that abstracts temporal structures from audio recordings. This model allows us to explicitly control key morphological aspects of the acoustic scene and to isolate their impact on the performance of the system under evaluation. Thus, more information can be gained on the behavior of an evaluated system, providing guidance for further improvements. To demonstrate its potential, this model is employed to evaluate the performance of nine state of the art sound event detection systems submitted to the IEEE DCASE 2013 Challenge. Results indicate that the proposed scheme is able to successfully build datasets useful for evaluating important aspects of the performance of sound event detection systems, such as their robustness to new recording conditions and to varying levels of background audio.