Combination of magnitude and phase statistical features for audio classification

Abstract

The increasing demand for the retrieval and classification of audio utterances from multimedia databases, gives rise to the need for the implementation of effective feature extraction techniques. Most recent techniques employ temporal-related features and magnitude spectral features. In the proposed method, we use both the magnitude and phase spectrum of the signals to derive the features. By overcoming the discontinuity problems of phase, phase may be used as an additional feature stream. The experimental results derived from ten classes of gunshots show that, for certain classes, there is an improvement of 14% when both magnitude and phase information is employed, compared to the case when only the magnitude feature vector is used. Also, the results reported here show that the reliability of the method is increased, demonstrating the complementary nature of magnitude and phase.