# A General Network Architecture for Sound Event Localization and Detection Using Transfer Learning and Recurrent Neural Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07859 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07859/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [A Survey of Sound Source Localization with Deep Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03465/) (2021)
- [Extending GCC-PHAT using Shift Equivariant Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04654/) (2022)
- [LocSelect: Target Speaker Localization with an Auditory Selective Hearing Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10497/) (2023)
- [A Review on Sound Source Localization in Robotics: Focusing on Deep Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01143/) (2025)
- [What Makes Sound Event Localization and Detection Difficult? Insights from Error Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10469/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Polyphonic sound event detection and localization (SELD) task is challenging because it is difficult to jointly optimize sound event detection (SED) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in the same network. We propose a general network architecture for SELD in which the SELD network comprises sub-networks that are pretrained to solve SED and DOA estimation independently, and a recurrent layer that combines the SED and DOA estimation outputs into SELD outputs. The recurrent layer does the alignment between the sound classes and DOAs of sound events while being unaware of how these outputs are produced by the upstream SED and DOA estimation algorithms. This simple network architecture is compatible with different existing SED and DOA estimation algorithms. It is highly practical since the sub-networks can be improved independently. The experimental results using the DCASE 2020 SELD dataset show that the performances of our proposed network architecture using different SED and DOA estimation algorithms and different audio formats are competitive with other state-of-the-art SELD algorithms. The source code for the proposed SELD network architecture is available at Github.