  Despite surveillance systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our
living environment, automated surveillance, currently based on video sensory
modality and machine intelligence, lacks most of the time the robustness and
reliability required in several real applications. To tackle this issue, audio
sensory devices have been taken into account, both alone or in combination with
video, giving birth, in the last decade, to a considerable amount of research.
In this paper audio-based automated surveillance methods are organized into a
comprehensive survey: a general taxonomy, inspired by the more widespread video
surveillance field, is proposed in order to systematically describe the methods
covering background subtraction, event classification, object tracking and
situation analysis. For each of these tasks, all the significant works are
reviewed, detailing their pros and cons and the context for which they have
been proposed. Moreover, a specific section is devoted to audio features,
discussing their expressiveness and their employment in the above described
tasks. Differently, from other surveys on audio processing and analysis, the
present one is specifically targeted to automated surveillance, highlighting
the target applications of each described methods and providing the reader
tables and schemes useful to retrieve the most suited algorithms for a specific
requirement.
