Using sequential information in polyphonic sound event detection

To detect the class, and start and end times of sound events in real world recordings is a challenging task. Current computer systems often show relatively high frame-wise accuracy but low event-wise accuracy. In this paper, we attempted to merge the gap by explicitly including sequential information to improve the performance of a state-of-the-art polyphonic sound event detection system. We propose to 1) use delayed predictions of event activities as additional input features that are fed back to the neural network; 2) build N-grams to model the co-occurrence probabilities of different events; 3) use se-quentialloss to train neural networks. Our experiments on a corpus of real world recordings show that the N-grams could smooth the spiky output of a state-of-the-art neural network system, and improve both the frame-wise and the event-wise metrics.