Audio database in support of potential threat and crisis situation management

This paper describes a corpus consisting of audio data for automatic space monitoring based solely on the perceived acoustic information. The particular database is created as part of a project aiming at the detection of abnormal events, which lead to life-threatening situations or property damage. The audio corpus is composed of vocal reactions and environmental sounds that are usually encountered in atypical situations. The audio data is composed of three parts: Phase I - professional sound effects collections, Phase II recordings obtained from action and drama movies and Phase III - vocal reactions related to real-world emergency events as retrieved from television, radio broadcast news, documentaries etc. The annotation methodology is given in details along with preliminary classification results and statistical analysis of the dataset regarding Phase I. The main objective of such a dataset is to provide training data for automatic recognition machines that detect hazardous situations and to provide security enhancement in public environments, which otherwise require human supervision.