Introduction to the Special Section on Sound Scene and Event Analysis

The papers in this special section are devoted to the growing field of acoustic scene classification and acoustic event recognition. Machine listening systems still have difficulties to reach the ability of human listeners in the analysis of realistic acoustic scenes. If sustained research efforts have been made for decades in speech recognition, speaker identification and to a lesser extent in music information retrieval, the analysis of other types of sounds, such as environmental sounds, is the subject of growing interest from the community and is targeting an ever increasing set of audio categories. This problem appears to be particularly challenging due to the large variety of potential sound sources in the scene, which may in addition have highly different acoustic characteristics, especially in bioacoustics. Furthermore, in realistic environments, multiple sources are often present simultaneously, and in reverberant conditions.