Sound Event Localization and Detection for Real Spatial Sound Scenes: Event-Independent Network and Data Augmentation Chains

Polyphonic sound event localization and detection (SELD) aims at detecting types of sound events with corresponding temporal activities and spatial locations. In DCASE 2022 Task 3, types of data transform from computationally generated spatial recordings to recordings of real-sound scenes. Our system submitted to the DCASE 2022 Task 3 is based on our previous proposed Event-Independent Network V2 (EINV2) and a novel data augmentation method. To detect different sound events of the same type with different locations, our method employs EINV2, combining a track-wise output format, permutation-invariant training, and soft parameter-sharing. EINV2 is also extended to use conformer structures to learn local and global patterns. To improve the generalization ability of the model, we use a data augmentation method containing several data augmentation chains, which are composed of random combinations of several different data augmentation operations. To mitigate the lack of real-scene recordings in the development dataset and the presence of sound events being unbalanced, we exploit FSD50K, AudioSet, and TAU Spatial Room Impulse Response Database (TAU-SRIR DB) to generate simulated datasets for training. We present results on the validation set of Sony-TAu Realistic Spatial Soundscapes 2022 (STARSS22) in detail. Experimental results indicate that the ability to generalize to different environments and unbalanced performance among different classes are two main challenges. We evaluate our proposed method in Task 3 of DCASE 2022 challenge and obtain the second rank in the teams ranking. Source code is released.