{Erik Marchi ; Fabio Vesperini ; Felix Weninger ; Florian Eyben ; Stefano Squartini ; Björn Schuller}

Abstract

Acoustic novelty detection aims at identifying abnormal/novel acoustic signals which differ from the reference/normal data that the system was trained with. In this paper we present a novel approach based on non-linear predictive denoising autoencoders. In our approach, auditory spectral features of the next short-term frame are predicted from the previous frames by means of Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent denoising autoencoders. We show that this yields an effective generative model for audio. The reconstruction error between the input and the output of the autoencoder is used as activation signal to detect novel events. The autoencoder is trained on a public database which contains recordings of typical in-home situations such as talking, watching television, playing and eating. The evaluation was performed on more than 260 different abnormal events. We compare results with state-of-the-art methods and we conclude that our novel approach significantly outperforms existing methods by achieving up to 94.4% F-Measure.