Towards a Gated Graph Neural Network with an Attention Mechanism for Audio Features with a Situation Awareness Application

Situation awareness (SA) involves analyzing sensory data, such as audio signals, to identify anomalies. While acoustic features are widely used in audio analysis, existing methods face critical limitations; they often overlook the relevance of SA audio segments, failing to capture the complex relational patterns in audio data that are essential for SA. In this study, we first propose a graph neural network (GNN) with an attention mechanism that models SA audio features through graph structures, capturing both node attributes and their relationships for richer representations than traditional methods. Our analysis identifies suitable audio feature combinations and graph constructions for SA tasks. Building on this, we introduce a situation awareness gated-attention GNN (SAGA-GNN), which dynamically filters irrelevant nodes through max-relevance neighbor sampling to reduce redundant connections, and a learnable edge gated-attention mechanism that suppresses noise while amplifying critical events. The proposed method employs sigmoid-activated attention weights conditioned on both node features and temporal relationships, enabling adaptive node emphasizing for different acoustic environments. Experiments reveal that the proposed graph-based audio features demonstrate superior representation capacity compared to traditional methods. Additionally, both proposed graph-based methods outperform existing approaches. Specifically, owing to the combination of graph-based audio features and dynamic selection of audio nodes based on gated-attention, SAGA-GNN achieved superior results on two real datasets. This work underscores the importance and potential value of graph-based audio features and attention mechanism-based GNNs, particularly in situational awareness applications.