New publication: A Dataset and Taxonomy for Urban Sound Research

Our paper “A Dataset and Taxonomy for Urban Sound Research” has been accepted for publication at the 22nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM-MM’14).

Automatic urban sound classification is a growing area of research with applications in multimedia retrieval and urban informatics. In this paper we identify two main barriers to research in this area – the lack of a common taxonomy and the scarceness of large, real-world, annotated data. To address these issues we present a taxonomy of urban sounds and a new dataset, UrbanSound, containing 27 hours of au- dio with 18.5 hours of annotated sound event occurrences across 10 sound classes. The challenges presented by the new dataset are studied through a series of experiments using a baseline classification system.

The full paper is available on the Publications page. You may also wish to visit the UrbanSound dataset companion website.