Mixstyle based Domain Generalization for Sound Event Detection with Heterogeneous Training Data

Abstract: This work explores domain generalization (DG) for sound event detection (SED), advancing adaptability towards real-world scenarios. Our approach employs a mean-teacher framework with domain generalization to integrate heterogeneous training data, while preserving the SED model performance across the datasets. Specifically, we first apply mixstyle to the frequency dimension to adapt the mel-spectrograms from different domains. Next, we use the adaptive residual normalization method to generalize features across multiple domains by applying instance normalization in the frequency dimension. Lastly, we use the sound event bounding boxes method for post-processing. Our approach integrates features from bidirectional encoder representations from audio transformers and a convolutional recurrent neural network. We evaluate the proposed approach on DCASE 2024 Challenge Task 4 dataset, measuring polyphonic SED score (PSDS) on the DESED dataset and macro-average pAUC on the MAESTRO dataset. The results indicate that the proposed DG-based method improves both PSDS and macro-average pAUC compared to the challenge baseline.