Saliency-based modeling of acoustic scenes using sparse non-negative matrix factorization

The modeling of auditory scenes is a challenging task in Computational Auditory Scene Analysis. A method based on sparse Non-negative Matrix Factorization that can be used with no prior knowledge of the audio content to establish the similarity between scenes is proposed in this work. It is then evaluated on a corpus of soundscapes of train stations from a perceptual study and results are compared with the human perception. The proposed method, by being able to focus on salient events within the scene, achieves better performances than a state-of-the-art Bag-of-Frames approach though not reaching the human performances.