Machine Learning Algorithms for Environmental Sound Recognition: Towards Soundscape Semantics

This paper investigates methods aiming at the automatic recognition and classification of discrete environmental sounds, for the purpose of subsequently applying these methods to the recognition of soundscapes. Research in audio recognition has traditionally focused on the domains of speech and music. Comparatively little research has been done towards recognizing non-speech environmental sounds. For this reason, in this paper, we apply existing techniques that have been proved efficient in the other two domains. These techniques are comprehensively compared to determine the most appropriate one for addressing the problem of environmental sound recognition.