Classification of audio scenes with novel features in a fused system framework

The rapidly increasing requirements from context-aware gadgets, like smartphones and intelligent wearable devices, along with applications such as audio archiving, have given a fillip to the research in the field of Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC). The Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) challenges have seen systems addressing the problem of ASC from different directions. Some of them could achieve better results than the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients - Gaussian Mixture Model (MFCC-GMM) baseline system. However, a collective decision from all participating systems was found to surpass the accuracy obtained by each system. The simultaneous use of various approaches can exploit the discriminating information in a better way for audio collected from different environments covering audible-frequency range in varying degrees. In this work, we show that the frame-level statistics of some well-known spectral features when fed to Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier individually, are able to outperform the baseline system of DCASE challenges. Furthermore, we analyzed different methods of combining these features, and also of combining information from two channels when the data is in binaural format. The proposed approach resulted in around 17% and 9% relative improvement in accuracy with respect to the baseline system on the development and evaluation dataset, respectively, from DCASE 2016 ASC task.