Sound-Event Recognition with a Companion Humanoid

Maxime Janvier (1) , Xavier Alameda-Pineda (1) , Laurent Girin (1, 2) , Radu Horaud (1)

1 PERCEPTION - Interpretation and Modelling of Images and Videos
2 GIPSA-MAGIC - GIPSA - Machines parlantes, Gestes oro-faciaux, Interaction Face-à-face, Communication augmentée

In this paper we address the problem of recognizing everyday sound events in indoor environments with a consumer robot. Sounds are represented in the spectro-temporal domain using the stabilized auditory image (SAI) representation. The SAI is well suited for representing pulse-resonance sounds and has the interesting property of mapping a time-varying signal into a fixed-dimension feature vector space. This allows us to map the sound recognition problem into a supervised classification problem and to adopt a variety of classifications schemes. We present a complete system that takes as input a continuous signal, splits it into significant isolated sounds and noise, and classifies the isolated sounds using a catalogue of learned sound-event classes. The method is validated with a large set of audio data recorded with a humanoid robot in a house. Extended experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art recognition scores with a twelve-class problem, while requiring extremely limited memory space and moderate computing power. A first real-time embedded implementation in a consumer robot show its ability to work in real conditions.

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Maxime Janvier, Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Laurent Girin, Radu Horaud. Sound-Event Recognition with a Companion Humanoid. Humanoids 2012 - IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, Nov 2012, Osaka, Japan. pp.104-111, ⟨10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2012.6651506⟩. ⟨hal-00768767⟩