Enhanced Sound Event Localization and Detection in Real 360-degree audio-visual soundscapes

This technical report details our work towards building an enhanced audio-visual sound event localization and detection (SELD) network. We build on top of the audio-only SELDnet23 model and adapt it to be audio-visual by merging both audio and video information prior to the gated recurrent unit (GRU) of the audio-only network. Our model leverages YOLO and DETIC object detectors. We also build a framework that implements audio-visual data augmentation and audio-visual synthetic data generation. We deliver an audio-visual SELDnet system that outperforms the existing audio-visual SELD baseline.

Spatial Scaper: A Library to Simulate and Augment Soundscapes for Sound Event Localization and Detection in Realistic Rooms

Sound event localization and detection (SELD) is an important task in machine listening. Major advancements rely on simulated data with sound events in specific rooms and strong spatio-temporal labels. SELD data is simulated by convolving spatialy-localized room impulse responses (RIRs) with sound waveforms to place sound events in a soundscape. However, RIRs require manual collection in specific rooms. We present SpatialScaper, a library for SELD data simulation and augmentation. Compared to existing tools, SpatialScaper emulates virtual rooms via parameters such as size and wall absorption. This allows for parameterized placement (including movement) of foreground and background sound sources. SpatialScaper also includes data augmentation pipelines that can be applied to existing SELD data. As a case study, we use SpatialScaper to add rooms to the DCASE SELD data. Training a model with our data led to progressive performance improves as a direct function of acoustic diversity. These results show that SpatialScaper is valuable to train robust SELD models.

Robust DOA estimation using deep acoustic imaging

Direction of arrival estimation (DoAE) aims at tracking a sound in azimuth and elevation. Recent advancements include data-driven models with inputs derived from ambisonics intensity vectors or correlations between channels in a microphone array. A spherical intensity map (SIM), or acoustic image, is an alternative input representation that remains underexplored. SIMs benefit from high-resolution microphone arrays, yet most DoAE datasets use low-resolution ones. Therefore, we first propose a super-resolution method to upsample low-resolution microphones. Next, we benchmark DoAE models that use SIMs as input. We arrive to a model that uses SIMs for DoAE estimation and outperforms a baseline and a state-of-the-art model. Our study highlights the relevance of acoustic imaging for DoAE tasks.