In ubiquitous environments, analysis and classification of sound plays a critical role in various acoustic-based recognition systems. This work aims to contribute towards building an automatic sound recognition system that can understand the surrounding environment by the audio information. In this paper, an acoustic signal based context awareness system is proposed for detecting sound events i...

A computational model of auditory attention to environmental sound, inspired by the structure of the human auditory system, is presented. The model simulates how listeners switch their attention over time between different auditory streams, based on bottom-up and top-down cues. The bottom-up cues are determined by the time-dependent saliency of each stream. The latter is calculated on the basis...

Research suggests that visual impressions of natural compared with urban environments facilitate recovery after psychological stress. To test whether auditory stimulation has similar effects, 40 subjects were exposed to sounds from nature or noisy environments after a stressful mental arithmetic task. Skin conductance level (SCL) was used to index sympathetic activation, and high frequency hear...

The paper considers the task of recognizing environmental sounds, which plays a critical role in human’s perception of an auditory context in audiovisual materials. A variety of features have been proposed for audio recognition, either frame-based or segmental. Here, we propose a two-stage framework to combine modeling in these two levels. First, the Gaussian Mixture Models(GMMs) are built base...

Neural network based architectures used for sound recognition are usually adapted from other application domains, which may not harness sound related properties. The ConditionaL Neural Network (CLNN) is designed to consider the relational properties across frames in a temporal signal, and its extension the Masked ConditionaL Neural Network (MCLNN) embeds a filterbank behavior within the network...

In recent years, natural materials are becoming a valid alternative to traditional sound absorbers due to reduced production costs and environmental protection. This paper reports the acoustical characterization of sheep wool. Measurements on normal incidence and diffuse-incidence sound absorption coefficients of different samples are reported. The airflow resistance has also been measured. The...

This paper proposes the model based detection method of abnormal acoustic source using a microphone array. General source location algorithm using a microphone array can be used to locate a dominant acoustic source, while this does not verify whether the detected source is permitted one or not on outdoor environments. It is difficult to discern it among a natural environmental sound. Thus, to c...