Divided spectro-temporal attention for sound event localization and detection in real scenes for DCASE2023 challenge

Localizing sounds and detecting events in different room environments is a difficult task, mainly due to the wide range of reflections and reverberations. When training neural network models with sounds recorded in only a few room environments, there is a tendency for the models to become overly specialized to those specific environments, resulting in overfitting. To address this overfitting issue, we propose divided spectro-temporal attention. In comparison to the baseline method, which utilizes a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) followed by a temporal multi-head self-attention layer (MHSA), we introduce a separate spectral attention layer that aggregates spectral features prior to the temporal MHSA. To achieve efficient spectral attention, we reduce the frequency pooling size in the convolutional encoder of the baseline to obtain a 3D tensor that incorporates information about frequency, time, and channel. As a result, we can implement spectral attention with channel embeddings, which is not possible in the baseline method dealing with only temporal context in the RNN and MHSA layers. We demonstrate that the proposed divided spectro-temporal attention significantly improves the performance of sound event detection and localization scores for real test data from the STARSS23 development dataset. Additionally, we show that various data augmentations, such as frameshift, time masking, channel swapping, and moderate mix-up, along with the use of external data, contribute to the overall improvement in SELD performance.