Proposal-based Few-shot Sound Event Detection for Speech and Environmental Sounds with Perceivers

Many applications involve detecting and localizing specific sound events within long, untrimmed documents, including keyword spotting, medical observation, and bioacoustic monitoring for conservation. Deep learning techniques often set the state-of-the-art for these tasks. However, for some types of events, there is insufficient labeled data to train such models. In this paper, we propose a region proposal-based approach to few-shot sound event detection utilizing the Perceiver architecture. Motivated by a lack of suitable benchmark datasets, we generate two new few-shot sound event localization datasets: "Vox-CASE," using clips of celebrity speech as the sound event, and "ESC-CASE," using environmental sound events. Our highest performing proposed few-shot approaches achieve 0.483 and 0.418 F1-score, respectively, with 5-shot 5-way tasks on these two datasets. These represent relative improvements of 72.5% and 11.2% over strong proposal-free few-shot sound event detection baselines.