Towards duration robust weakly supervised sound event detection

Sound event detection (SED) is the task of tagging the absence or presence of audio events and their corresponding interval within a given audio clip. While SED can be done using supervised machine learning, where training data is fully labeled with access to per event timestamps and duration, our work focuses on weakly-supervised sound event detection (WSSED), where prior knowledge about an event's duration is unavailable. Recent research within the field focuses on improving localization performance for specific datasets regarding specific evaluation metrics. Specifically, well-performing event-level localization work requires fully labeled development subsets to obtain event duration estimates, which significantly benefits localization performance. Moreover, well-performing segment-level localization models output predictions at a coarse-scale, hindering their deployment on datasets containing very short events. This work proposes a duration robust CRNN (CDur) framework, which aims to achieve competitive performance in terms of segment- and event-level localization. In the meantime, this paper proposes a new post-processing strategy named Triple Threshold and investigates two data augmentation methods along with a label smoothing method within the scope of WSSED. Evaluation of our model is done on three publicly available datasets: Task 4 of the DCASE2017 and 2018 datasets, as well as URBAN-SED. Our model outperforms other approaches on the DCASE2018 and URBAN-SED datasets without requiring prior duration knowledge. In particular, our model is capable of similar performance to strongly-labeled supervised models on the URBAN-SED dataset. Lastly, we run a series of ablation experiments to reveal that without post-processing, our model's localization performance drop is significantly lower compared with other approaches.