The present disclosure introduces a new technique for environmental recognition of audio input using feature selection. In one embodiment, audio data may be identified using feature selection. A plurality of audio descriptors may be ranked by calculating a Fisher's discriminant ratio for each audio descriptor. Next, a configurable number of highest ranking audio descriptors based on the Fisher's discriminant ratio of each audio descriptor are selected to obtain a selected feature set. The selected feature set is then applied to audio data. Other embodiments are also described.