# Threshold Independent Evaluation of Sound Event Detection Scores

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.13148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Pushing the Frontier of Audiovisual Perception with Large-Scale Multimodal Correspondence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19687/) (2025)
- [TACOS: Temporally-aligned Audio CaptiOnS for Language-Audio Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07609/) (2025)
- [Why do Angular Margin Losses work well for Semi-Supervised Anomalous Sound Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15643/) (2023)
- [FlexSED: Towards Open-Vocabulary Sound Event Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18606/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Audio-language Pretraining for Learning General-purpose Audio Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16757/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Classification Systems Against Soft Labels with Fuzzy Precision and Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13938/) (2023)
- [RealDESED: A Real-World Domestic Sound Event Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16736/) (2026)
- [MTDA-HSED: Mutual-Assistance Tuning and Dual-Branch Aggregating for Heterogeneous Sound Event Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06196/) (2024)
- [Exploring Performance-Complexity Trade-Offs in Sound Event Detection Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11373/) (2025)
- [Semi-Supervised Sound Event Detection with Conditional Mixup and Embedding-Level Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29901/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Performing an adequate evaluation of sound event detection (SED) systems is far from trivial and is still subject to ongoing research. The recently proposed polyphonic sound detection (PSD)-receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and PSD score (PSDS) make an important step into the direction of an evaluation of SED systems which is independent from a certain decision threshold. This allows to obtain a more complete picture of the overall system behavior which is less biased by threshold tuning. Yet, the PSD-ROC is currently only approximated using a finite set of thresholds. The choice of the thresholds used in approximation, however, can have a severe impact on the resulting PSDS. In this paper we propose a method which allows for computing system performance on an evaluation set for all possible thresholds jointly, enabling accurate computation not only of the PSD-ROC and PSDS but also of other collar-based and intersection-based performance curves. It further allows to select the threshold which best fulfills the requirements of a given application. Source code is publicly available in our SED evaluation package sed_scores_eval.