English

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

Audio and Speech Processing 2022-06-07 v3 Sound

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.00275,
  title  = {SALSA: Spatial Cue-Augmented Log-Spectrogram Features for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection},
  author = {Thi Ngoc Tho Nguyen and Karn N. Watcharasupat and Ngoc Khanh Nguyen and Douglas L. Jones and Woon-Seng Gan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.00275},
  year   = {2022}
}

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R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:32:55.769Z