In many countries around the world, the number of elderly people living alone has been increasing. In the last few years, a significant number of research projects on elderly people monitoring have been launched. Most of them make use of several modalities such as video streams, sound, fall detection and so on, in order to monitor the activities of an elderly person, to supply them with a natural way to communicate with their “smart-home”, and to render assistance in case of an emergency. This work is part of the Industrial Research ANR VERSO project, Sweet-Home. The goals of the project are to propose a domotic system that enables a natural interaction (using touch and voice command) between an elderly person and their house and to provide them a higher safety level through the detection of distress situations. Thus, the goal of this work is to come up with solutions for sound recognition of daily life in a realistic context. Sound recognition will run prior to an Automatic Speech Recognition system. Therefore, the speech recognition’s performances rely on the reliability of the speech/non-speech separation. Furthermore, a good recognition of a few kinds of sounds, complemented by other sources of information (presence detection, fall detection, etc.) could allow for a better monitoring of the person's activities that leads to a better detection of dangerous situations. We first had been interested in methods from the Speaker Recognition and Verification field. As part of this, we have experimented methods based on GMM and SVM. We had particularly tested a Sequence Discriminant SVM kernel called SVM-GSL (SVM GMM Super Vector Linear Kernel). SVM-GSL is a combination of GMM and SVM whose basic idea is to map a sequence of vectors of an arbitrary length into one high dimensional vector called a Super Vector and used as an input of an SVM. Experiments had been carried out using a locally created sound database (containing 18 sound classes for over 1000 records), then using the Sweet-Home project's corpus. Our daily sounds recognition system was integrated into a more complete system that also performs a multi-channel sound detection and speech recognition. These first experiments had all been performed using one kind of acoustical coefficients, MFCC coefficients. Thereafter, we focused on the study of other families of acoustical coefficients. The aim of this study was to assess the usability of other acoustical coefficients for environmental sounds recognition. Our motivation was to find a few representations that are simpler and/or more effective than the MFCC coefficients. Using 15 different acoustical coefficients families, we have also experimented two approaches to map a sequence of vectors into one vector, usable with a linear SVM. The first approach consists of computing a set of a fixed number of statistical coefficients and use them instead of the whole sequence. The second one, which is one of the novel contributions of this work, makes use of a discretization method to find, for each feature within an acoustical vector, the best cut points that associates a given class with one or many intervals of values. The likelihood of the sequence is estimated for each interval. The obtained likelihood values are used to build one single vector that replaces the sequence of acoustical vectors. The obtained results show that a few families of coefficients are actually more appropriate to the recognition of some sound classes. For most sound classes, we noticed that the best recognition performances were obtained with one or many families other than MFCC. Moreover, a number of these families are less complex than MFCC. They are actually a one-feature per frame acoustical families, whereas MFCC coefficients contain 16 features per frame
