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arXiv · 2110.00275

SALSA: Spatial Cue-Augmented Log-Spectrogram Features for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection

Thi Ngoc Tho Nguyen·Karn N. Watcharasupat·Ngoc Khanh Nguyen·Douglas L. Jones·Woon-Seng Gan
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Abstract

Sound event localization and detection (SELD) consists of two subtasks, which are sound event detection and direction-of-arrival estimation. While sound event detection mainly relies on time-frequency patterns to distinguish different sound classes, direction-of-arrival estimation uses amplitude and/or phase differences between microphones to estimate source directions. As a result, it is often difficult to jointly optimize these two subtasks. We propose a novel feature called Spatial cue-Augmented Log-SpectrogrAm (SALSA) with exact time-frequency mapping between the signal power and the source directional cues, which is crucial for resolving overlapping sound sources. The SALSA feature consists of multichannel log-spectrograms stacked along with the normalized principal eigenvector of the spatial covariance matrix at each corresponding time-frequency bin. Depending on the microphone array format, the principal eigenvector can be normalized differently to extract amplitude and/or phase differences between the microphones. As a result, SALSA features are applicable for different microphone array formats such as first-order ambisonics (FOA) and multichannel microphone array (MIC). Experimental results on the TAU-NIGENS Spatial Sound Events 2021 dataset with directional interferences showed that SALSA features outperformed other state-of-the-art features. Specifically, the use of SALSA features in the FOA format increased the F1 score and localization recall by 6% each, compared to the multichannel log-mel spectrograms with intensity vectors. For the MIC format, using SALSA features increased F1 score and localization recall by 16% and 7%, respectively, compared to using multichannel log-mel spectrograms with generalized cross-correlation spectra.

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BibTeXRIS

Thi Ngoc Tho Nguyen, Karn N. Watcharasupat, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen, Douglas L. Jones, Woon-Seng Gan. 2022-06-06. SALSA: Spatial Cue-Augmented Log-Spectrogram Features for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection. https://doi.org/10.1109/taslp.2022.3173054

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