?Perceptual salience? is a term used by psychologists of vision to describe the power of an object to draw viewer attention; for example, it has been demonstrated that eye movements target salient objects sooner than less-salient objects, and that salient objects are detected more quickly than less-salient objects. The first sub-goal of this research is to develop automatic measurements of perceptual salience for auditory events, defined here to be a center-surround contrast in terms of amplitude, spectrum, or temporal features such as zero-crossing rate and periodicity. The second sub-goal of this research is to test salience measurements in an audio event detection paradigm, using the 2007 University of Illinois CLEAR evaluation system (Classification and Labeling of Events, Activities and Relationships). The third sub-goal of this research is to compare audio event transcriptions generated by human labelers viewing an audiovisual record of a meeting vs. transcriptions generated by labelers who listen to the audio without watching any accompanying video; the experimental hypothesis states that auditory salience predicts audio-only labels better than it predicts audiovisual labels. This research is designed as a collaboration between experts in computer vision and audio signal processing. If successful, the proposed methods will help to add an audio channel to the video security monitoring systems currently installed in many hospitals, nursing homes, government buildings and industrial sites.
