Environmental Sound Recognition With Time–Frequency Audio Features

The paper considers the task of recognizing environmental sounds for the understanding of a scene or context surrounding an audio sensor. A variety of features have been proposed for audio recognition, including the popular Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) which describe the audio spectral shape. Environmental sounds, such as chirpings of insects and sounds of rain which are typically noise-like with a broad flat spectrum, may include strong temporal domain signatures. However, only few temporal-domain features have been developed to characterize such diverse audio signals previously. Here, we perform an empirical feature analysis for audio environment characterization and propose to use the…