Selective Background Adaptation Based Abnormal Acoustic Event Recognition for Audio Surveillance

In this paper, a method for abnormal acoustic event recognition in an audio surveillance system is presented. We propose a recognition scheme based on a hierarchical structure using a feature combination of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC), timbre, and spectral statistics. A selective background adaptation is proposed for robust abnormal acoustic event recognition in real-world situations. For training, we use a database containing 9 abnormal events (scream, glass breaking, and etc.) and 6 background noise types collected under various surveillance situations. Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is considered for classifying the representative abnormal acoustic events and for selecting the background noise for adaptation. Effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated via representative experimental results.