Techniques are provided for acoustic event detection. A methodology implementing the techniques according to an embodiment includes extracting acoustic features from a received audio signal. The acoustic features may include, for example, one or more short-term Fourier transform frames, or other spectral energy characteristics, of the audio signal. The method also includes applying a trained classifier to the extracted acoustic features to identify and label acoustic event subparts of the audio signal and to generate scores associated with the subparts. The method further includes performing sequence decoding of the acoustic event subparts and associated scores to detect target acoustic events of interest based on the scores and temporal ordering sequence of the event subparts. The classifier is trained on acoustic event subparts that are generated through unsupervised subspace clustering techniques applied to training data that includes target acoustic events.