A Transpose-SELDNet for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection

Human beings have the ability to identify a particular event occurring in a surrounding based on sound cues even when no visual scenes are presented. Sound events are the auditory cues that are present in a surrounding. Sound event detection (SED) is the process of determining the beginning and end of sound events as well as a textual label for the event. The term sound source localization (SSL) refers to the process of identifying the spatial location of a sound occurrence in addition to the SED. The integrated task of SED and SSL is known as Sound Event Localization and Detection (SELD). In this proposed work, three different deep learning architectures are explored to perform SELD. The three deep learning architectures are SELDNet, D-SELDNet (Depthwise Convolution), and T-SELDNet (Transpose Convolution). Two sets of features are used to perform SED and Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) estimation tasks in this work. D-SELDNet uses a Depthwise convolution layer which helps reduce the model’s complexity in terms of computation time. T-SELDNet uses Transpose Convolution, which helps in learning better discriminative features by retaining the input size and not losing necessary information from the input. The proposed method is evaluated on the First-order Ambisonic (FOA) array format of the TAU-NIGENS Spatial Sound Events 2020 dataset. An improvement has been observed as compared to the existing SELD systems with the proposed T-SELDNet.