Improving Stereo 3D Sound Event Localization and Detection: Perceptual Features, Stereo-specific Data Augmentation, and Distance Normalization

This technical report presents our submission to Task 3 of the DCASE 2025 Challenge: Stereo Sound Event Localization and Detection (SELD) in Regular Video Content. We address the audio-only task in this report and introduce several key contributions. First, we design perceptually-motivated input features that improve event detection, sound source localization, and distance estimation. Second, we adapt augmentation strategies specifically for the intricacies of stereo audio, including channel swapping and time-frequency masking. We also incorporate the recently proposed FilterAugment technique that has yet to be explored for SELD work. Lastly, we apply a distance normalization approach during training to stabilize regression targets. Experiments on the stereo STARSS23 dataset demonstrate consistent performance gains across all SELD metrics. Code to replicate our work is available in this repository: https://github.com/itsjunwei/NTU_SNTL_Task3