Latent semantic analysis in sound event detection

This paper presents the use of probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) for modeling co-occurrence of overlapping sound events in audio recordings from everyday audio environments such as office, street or shop. Co-occurrence of events is represented as the degree of their overlapping in a fixed length segment of polyphonic audio. In the training stage, PLSA is used to learn the relationships between individual events. In detection, the PLSA model continuously adjusts the probabilities of events according to the history of events detected so far. The event probabilities provided by the model are integrated into a sound event detection system that outputs a monophonic sequence of events. The model offers a very good representation of the data, having low perplexity on test recordings. Using PLSA for estimating prior probabilities of events provides an increase of event detection accuracy to 35%, compared to 30% for using uniform priors for the events. There are different levels of performance increase in different audio contexts, with few contexts showing significant improvement.