text: Artificial sound event detection (SED) aims to mimic the human ability to perceive and understand what is happening in the surroundings. Nowadays, deep learning offers valuable techniques for this goal, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The capsule neural network (CapsNet) architecture has been recently introduced in the image processing field with the intent to overcome some of the known limitations of CNNs, specifically regarding the scarce robustness to affine transformations (i.e., perspective, size, and orientation) and the detection of overlapped images. This motivated the authors to employ CapsNets to deal with the polyphonic SED task, in which multiple sound events occur simultaneously. Specifically, we propose to exploit the capsule units to represent a set of distinctive properties for each individual sound event. Capsule units are connected through a so-called dynamic routing that encourages learning part-whole relationships and improves the detection performance in a polyphonic context. This paper reports extensive evaluations carried out on three publicly available datasets, showing how the CapsNet-based algorithm not only outperforms standard CNNs but also achieves the best results with respect to the state-of-the-art algorithms.
  @cite_27: Sound events often occur in unstructured environments where they exhibit wide variations in their frequency content and temporal structure. Convolutional neural networks CNNs are able to extract higher level features that are invariant to local spectral and temporal variations. Recurrent neural networks RNNs are powerful in learning the longer term temporal context in the audio signals. CNNs and RNNs as classifiers have recently shown improved performances over established methods in various sound recognition tasks. We combine these two approaches in a convolutional recurrent neural network CRNN and apply it on a polyphonic sound event detection task. We compare the performance of the proposed CRNN method with CNN, RNN, and other established methods, and observe a considerable improvement for four different datasets consisting of everyday sound events.
  @cite_31: The authors propose an audio events detection system tailored to surveillance applications.The method has been tested on a huge and challenging data set, made publicly available.The performance analysis has been done for low SNR values and under various conditions.A comparative analysis with other methods from the literature has been performed. In this paper we propose a novel method for the detection of audio events for surveillance applications. The method is based on the bag of words approach, adapted to deal with the specific issues of audio surveillance: the need to recognize both short and long sounds, the presence of a significant noise level and of superimposed background sounds of intensity comparable to the audio events to be detected. In order to test the proposed method in complex, realistic scenarios, we have built a large, publicly available dataset of audio events. The dataset has allowed us to evaluate the robustness of our method with respect to varying levels of the Signal-to-Noise Ratio; the experimentation has confirmed its applicability under real world conditions, and has shown a significant performance improvement with respect to other methods from the literature.
summary: The combination of the CNN structure with recurrent units has increased the detection performance by taking advantage of the characteristics of each architecture. This is the case of convolutional recurrent neural networks (CRNNs) @cite_27 , which provided state-of-the-art performance especially in the case of polyphonic SED. CRNNs consolidate the CNN property of local shift invariance with the capability to model short and long term temporal dependencies provided by the RNN layers. This architecture has been also employed in almost all of the most performing algorithms proposed in the recent editions of research challenges such as the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) @cite_31 . On the other hand, if the datasets are not sufficiently large, problems such as overfitting can be encountered with these models, which typically are composed of a considerable number of free-parameters (i.e., more than 1M).