Features for segmenting and classifying long-duration recordings of "personal" audio

A digital recorder weighing ounces and able to record for more than ten hours can be bought for a few hundred dollars. Such devices make possible continuous recordings of “personal audio” – storing essentially everything heard by the owner. Without automatic indexing, however, such recordings are almost useless. In this paper, we describe some experiments with recordings of this kind, focusing on the problem of segmenting the recordings into different ‘episodes’ corresponding to different acoustic environments experienced by the device. We describe several novel features to describe 1-minute-long frames of audio, and investigate their effectiveness at reproducing hand-labeled ground-truth segment boundaries.