ROOM ACOUSTICS AND MICROPHONE CHARACTERISTICS SHOW SYSTEMATIC IMPACT ON SOUND EVENT RECOGNITION

Gabriel Bibbó; Craig Cieciura; Mark D Plumbley

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Submission

Paper Title

ROOM ACOUSTICS AND MICROPHONE CHARACTERISTICS SHOW SYSTEMATIC IMPACT ON SOUND EVENT RECOGNITION

Authors

Gabriel Bibbó
Craig Cieciura
Mark D Plumbley

Modality

Onsite-Oral

Subject area

15.0. Soundscape: General

Publishing Date

18/08/2025

Country of Publishing

Brazil | Brasil

Language of Publishing

Inglês

Paper Page

https://www.even3.com.br/anais/international-congress-exposition-noise-control-engineering/1070751-room-acoustics-and-microphone-characteristics-show-systematic-impact-on-sound-event-recognition

ISBN

978-65-272-1573-8

Keywords

Domestic Environments, Sound Event Recognition, CNNs, Hardware-Aware Processing, Room Acoustics, Microphone Characterization

Summary

The robustness of audio pattern recognition systems under varying acoustic conditions and hardware remains a critical challenge for real-world applications. We examine how room acoustics, microphone characteristics, and overlapping events affect classification performance for domestic events. We conducted experiments in four rooms at the University of Surrey—with reverberation times (RT60: 0.27–0.78 s, 50 Hz–10 kHz) and clarity indices (C50: 11.6–18.5 dB; C80: 13.1–25.9 dB, 500 Hz–1 kHz)—using four microphones (USB Condenser, ICS-43432 stereo, AudioMoth, and Earthworks M23 reference). For two CNN-14 architectures, baseline performance (obtained from the original audio) was used for comparison with different microphone/room configurations. Results (expressed as the percentage of audio frames correctly detected versus ground truth) show: First, high RT60 degraded detection of impulsive events (e.g., door knocks) by approximately 50%, while sustained events (e.g., speech, music) remained above 90%. Second, overlapping events produced masking effects that reduced performance by about 20%. Third, while microphone differences affect accuracy, low-cost devices matched reference performance for speech and music classes. Both architectures exhibited similar degradation patterns across conditions. These results underscore the need for improved acoustic characterization and hardware-aware processing. Future work should integrate adaptive feature extraction and training strategies to mitigate reverberation and overlap in complex environments.

Title of the Event: Inter-Noise 2025
City of the Event: São Paulo
Title of the Proceedings of the event: Proceedings of the 54th International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering
Name of the Publisher: Even3
Means of Dissemination: Meio Digital

How to cite

BIBBÓ, Gabriel; CIECIURA, Craig; PLUMBLEY, Mark D. ROOM ACOUSTICS AND MICROPHONE CHARACTERISTICS SHOW SYSTEMATIC IMPACT ON SOUND EVENT RECOGNITION.. In: Proceedings of the 54th International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering. Anais...Sao Paulo(SP) WTC Events Center, 2025. Available in: https//www.even3.com.br/anais/international-congress-exposition-noise-control-engineering/1070751-ROOM-ACOUSTICS-AND-MICROPHONE-CHARACTERISTICS-SHOW-SYSTEMATIC-IMPACT-ON-SOUND-EVENT-RECOGNITION. Access in: 17/09/2025