Environmental sound event detection in wireless acoustic sensor networks for home telemonitoring

In this paper, we present an approach to improve the accuracy of environmental sound event detection in a wireless acoustic sensor network for home monitoring. Wireless acoustic sensor nodes can capture sounds in the home and simultaneously deliver them to a sink node for sound event detection. The proposed approach is mainly composed of three modules, including signal estimation, reliable sensor channel selection, and sound event detection. During signal estimation, lost packets are recovered to improve the signal quality. Next, reliable channels are selected using a multi-channel cross-correlation coefficient to improve the computational efficiency for distant sound event detection without sacrificing performance. Finally, the signals of the selected two channels are used for environmental sound event detection based on bidirectional gated recurrent neural networks using two-channel audio features. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves superior performances compared to the baseline.