Sounds in our everyday surroundings carry a plethora of information, from single physical events to whole acoustic scenes. As human beings we distinctly perceive and make use of our auditory environment to extract valuable information and assess situations. By analysing such scenes and events with the help of computational methods, we can automate this process and built systems to recognise or cluster situations of importance.

Applications for intelligent sound recognition systems include monitoring private, public or commercial infrastructure regarding buildings or machinery, traffic surveillance and car crash detection, general city noise monitoring, alarming signals or violence indication at public events and spaces, verifying media content towards adult, violent or inappropriate content, endow mobile devices and wearables with context awareness, autonomous driving systems or health care related tasks, for example the observation of patients in hospitals with critical conditions.