Abstract. This work studies the problem of violence detection in audio data, which can be used for automated content rating. We employ some popular frame-level audio features both from the time and frequency domain. Afterwards, several statistics of the calculated feature sequences are fed as input to a Support Vector Machine classifier, which decides about the segment content with respect to violence. The presented experimental results verify the validity of the approach and exhibit a better performance than the other known approaches.

Hidden Markov (chain) models using finite Gaussian mixture models as their hidden state distributions have been successfully applied in sequential data modeling and classification applications. Nevertheless, Gaussian mixture models are well known to be highly intolerant to the presence of untypical data within the fitting data sets used for their estimation. Finite Student's t-mixture models have recently emerged as a heavier-tailed, robust alternative to Gaussian mixture models, overcoming these hurdles. To exploit these merits of Student's t-mixture models in the context of a sequential data modeling setting, we introduce, in this paper, a novel hidden Markov model where the hidden state distributions are considered to be finite mixtures of multivariate Student's t-densities. We derive an algorithm for the model parameters estimation under a maximum likelihood framework, assuming full, diagonal, and factor-analyzed covariance matrices. The advantages of the proposed model over conventional approaches are experimentally demonstrated through a series of sequential data modeling applications.

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Factor analysis is a statistical covariance modeling technique based on the assumption of normally distributed data. A mixture of factor analyzers can be hence viewed as a special case of Gaussian (normal) mixture models providing a mathematically sound framework for attribute space dimensionality reduction. A significant shortcoming of mixtures of factor analyzers is the vulnerability of normal distributions to outliers. Recently, the replacement of normal distributions with the heavier-tailed Student's-t distributions has been proposed as a way to mitigate these shortcomings and the treatment of the resulting model under an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm framework has been conducted. In this paper we develop a Bayesian approach to factor analysis modelling based on Student'st distributions. We derive a tractable variational inference algorithm for this model by expressing the Student's-t distributed factor analyzers as a marginalization over additional latent variables. Our innovative approach provides an efficient and more robust alternative to EM-based methods, resolving their singularity and overfitting proneness problems, while allowing for the automatic determination of the optimal model size. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over well-known covariance modeling techniques in a wide range of signal processing applications.

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