The human activity that takes place in meeting-rooms or class-rooms is reflected in a rich variety of acoustic events, either produced by the human body or by objects handled by humans, so the determination of both the identity of sounds and their position in time may help to detect and describe that human activity. Additionally, detection of sounds other than speech may be useful to enhance the robustness of speech technologies like automatic speech recognition.Automatic detection and classification of acoustic events is the objective of this thesis work. It aims at processing the acoustic signals collected by distant microphones in meeting-room or classroom environments to convert them into symbolic descriptions corresponding to a listener's perception of the different sound events that are present in the signals and their sources.First of all, the task of acoustic event classification is faced using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers, which are motivated by the scarcity of training data. A confusion-matrix-based variable-feature-set clustering scheme is developed for the multiclass recognition problem, and tested on the gathered database. With it, a higher classification rate than the GMM-based technique is obtained, arriving to a large relative average error reduction with respect to the best result from the conventional binary tree scheme. Moreover, several ways to extend SVMs to sequence processing are compared, in an attempt to avoid the drawback of SVMs when dealing with audio data, i.e. their restriction to work with fixed-length vectors, observing that the dynamic time warping kernels work well for sounds that show a temporal structure. Furthermore, concepts and tools from the fuzzy theory are used to investigate, first, the importance of and degree of interaction among features, and second, ways to fuse the outputs of several classification systems. The developed AEC systems are Two kinds of databases are used: two databases of isolated acoustic events, and a database of interactive seminars containing a significant number of acoustic events of interest. Our developed systems, which consist of SVM-based classification within a sliding window plus post-processing, were the only submissions not using HMMs, and each of them obtained competitive results in the corresponding evaluation.vi Speech activity detection was also pursued in this thesis since, in fact, it is a -especially important -particular case of acoustic event detection. An enhanced SVM training approach for the speech activity detection task is developed, mainly to cope with the problem of dataset reduction.The resulting SVM-based system is tested with several NIST Rich Transcription (RT) evaluation datasets, and it shows better scores than our GMM-based system, which ranked among the best systems in the RT06 evaluation.Finally, it is worth mentioning a few side outcomes from this thesis work. As it has been carried out in the framework of the CHIL EU project, the author has been responsible for the organization of the above m...
